1350–1400; Middle English levyathan < Late Latin leviathan ≪ Hebrew liwyāthān
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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| a fool or simpleton; ninny. |
| a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question. |
- He may underestimate the effects of pervasive state terror, the puniness of the individual living in the leviathan state.
- Leviathan is still trying to work out who might have played the main characacters with more oomph.
- It flashes past on my side of the plane, the cables off the stern straining at the sea as if to draw up a leviathan on a hook.
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leviathan
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A sea monster mentioned in the Book of Job, where it is associated with the forces of chaos and evil.
Note: Figuratively, a “leviathan” is any enormous beast.
Note: Leviathan is a work on politics by the seventeenth-century English author Thomas Hobbes.
Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
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Leviathan definition
a transliterated Hebrew word (livyathan), meaning "twisted," "coiled." In Job 3:8, Revised Version, and marg. of Authorized Version, it denotes the dragon which, according to Eastern tradition, is an enemy of light; in 41:1 the crocodile is meant; in Ps. 104:26 it "denotes any large animal that moves by writhing or wriggling the body, the whale, the monsters of the deep." This word is also used figuratively for a cruel enemy, as some think "the Egyptian host, crushed by the divine power, and cast on the shores of the Red Sea" (Ps. 74:14). As used in Isa. 27:1, "leviathan the piercing [R.V. 'swift'] serpent, even leviathan that crooked [R.V. marg. 'winding'] serpent," the word may probably denote the two empires, the Assyrian and the Babylonian.
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