Massive means huge and heavy with it — big in a way you feel rather than measure. A massive oak door, a massive wave standing up out of a grey sea, a massive lorry taking up the whole of a country lane.
In everyday British speech it has drifted away from weight and simply means very big: a massive row, a massive relief, a massive fan of the band. Physics keeps the strict sense, where a massive object is one with a great deal of mass and a massive star is enormous by weight rather than width. Geology uses it for rock in one solid piece with no layers in it. The adverb is massively — massively overpriced, massively popular. One warning: massive describes size and scale, not character. A massive man is a very large man, not a great one.
1adjectivemassiveExtremely large and heavy.~15%
“A massive stone had come down across the entrance.”
2adjectiveimmenseVery great in amount, degree or importance.~77%
“The film was a massive success in its first weekend.”
3adjectivemassHaving a large mass.~8%
“The star is massive enough to collapse into a black hole.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Massive is mass plus the ending -ive, which came into English as Middle English massif, borrowed from Middle French massif: having mass, made in a lump. In Ireland the word took a second road altogether — massive there means great or wonderful, and that sense may come from Irish mas, "fine, handsome", rather than from mass at all. Two words that look identical, arriving by different doors.
Irish
mas — fine, handsome
Middle French
massif
Middle English
massif
English, today
massive
From Middle English massif, from Middle French massif, equivalent to mass + ive. The Irish sense is possibly derived from Irish mas (“fine, handsome”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA