Other forms: juggernauts
A juggernaut is a huge force that crushes everything in its path. An unstoppable juggernaut.
In Britain it also means a very large lorry, which is the everyday sense. The word came from a temple cart in India that British writers described with a good deal of exaggeration.
1nounjuggernautA huge force that crushes everything in its path.
“The whole campaign became a juggernaut nobody could stop.”
juggernaut is a force.
From Jagannath, a form of the Hindu god Vishnu, whose temple cart gave English the word.
Sanskrit
ज॒ग॒न्ना॒थ — lord of universe
or
ଜଗନ୍ନାଥ
English, today
juggernaut
Borrowed in the 17th century into British English in India, either through inc-hnd جَگَنَّاتھ / जगन्नाथ or directly from or ଜଗନ୍ନାଥ, ultimately from Sanskrit ज॒ग॒न्ना॒थ (“lord of universe”) (Jagannatha), a title for the Hindu deity Vishnu's avatar Krishna. The sense comes from witnessing the Rath Yatra (chariot parade) at Puri, Odisha, a huge annual procession which features a wagon of the idol of Jagannath; pulled with ropes by hundreds of devotees, the wagon develops considerable momentum and becomes unstoppable. The r was not originally pronounced: for non-rhotic dialects of British English, the spelling with -er- accurately suggests the Hindi-Urdu pronunciation of the second vowel (a schwa ə); compare e.g. gorm. The spelling of the ending was influenced by the suffix -naut (“traveller, voyager”). a doublet of Jagannath.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA