Hulking means very large and heavy-looking. A hulking figure, hulking machinery, hulking great thing.
It suggests clumsiness as well as size, so it is rarely a compliment. Hulking great is a fixed intensifying phrase in British speech. It comes from hulk, the body of an old ship stripped and left afloat, and those hulks were used as prisons.
1adjectivehulkingVery large and heavy-looking.
“A hulking bodyguard stood silently beside the door.”
hulking is a quality of size.
Proto-Germanic
*hulukaz
Proto-West Germanic
*huluk
Old English
hulc — light ship; heavy, clumsy ship; cabin, hovel, hut
Middle Low German
hulk
Middle Dutch
hulk
Middle English
hulk
English
hulk
English, today
hulking
Built from
From hulk + -ing. hulk comes from Middle English hulk, hulke, holke (“hut; shed for hogs; type of ship; husk, pod, shell; large, clumsy person; a giant”) (probably reinforced by Middle Dutch hulk, huelc, and Middle Low German hulk, holk, hollek (“freighter, cargo ship, barge”)), from Old English hulc (“light ship; heavy, clumsy ship; cabin, hovel, hut”), from Proto-West Germanic huluk, hulik, from Proto-Germanic hulukaz, hulikaz (“something hollowed or dug out, cavity”), equivalent to hole/hollow + -ock. Cognate with Old High German holcho (“cargo or transport ship, barge”) (whence Middle High German holche, modern German Holk), Old Norse hólkr (“metal tube, ring”), dialectal Norwegian holk, hylke (“wooden barrel”), Middle English holken (“to dig out, gouge”). Relation to Medieval Latin hulcus (“ship”) is uncertain, as Old English may have borrowed from Latin or vice versa, but the form holcas rather points to borrowing from ὁλκάς (compare
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA