Stupendous means astonishingly great. A stupendous achievement, stupendous scale, stupendously good.
It is at the top of the range and slightly old-fashioned, which is why it now sounds either grand or comic. It works for size and for quality alike. Note stupendously, used as an intensifier; and that stupendous, stupor and stupid all come from the Latin for being stunned — the same root produced a compliment and an insult.
1adjectivestupendousAstonishingly great.
“The view from the top of the waterfall was stupendous.”
synonyms: prodigious, tremendous
stupendous is a quality of greatness.
Latin stupendus comes from stupere, to be stunned. Stupor and stupid come from the same stunning, one meaning astonishing and the other astonished.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)tewp-
Latin
stupendus — stunning, amazing
English, today
stupendous
Built from
First attested from 1547, from Latin stupendus (“stunning, amazing”), from the verb stupeō (“(I) am stunned”). a doublet of stupend (which is obsolete), and related to stupor and stupid.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA