Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty. This week, in honor of Halloween, we’ll talk about four everyday words that started out as the names of monsters, and then we’ll look at the difference between a graveyard and a cemetery.
4 Freaky Words Based on Monster Names
by Samantha Enslen
It’s almost Halloween, a time for all things spooky and scary. And what’s scarier than monsters?
Today we’re going to talk about four normal words that are derived from the names of monsters and other mythical beings.
Pull the blanket over your head if you need to! Because here we go.
Hippocampus
You probably learned in fifth grade that the hippocampus is the part of the brain that helps us create and retain memories. (5) But you might not know that it is named after a mythological creature called the “Hippocamp.” This was the water horse in the classical mythology of Greece and Rome.
The word comes from the Greek “hippos,” meaning “horse,” and “kampos,” meaning sea monster. (1) And indeed, the hippocamp had the top half of a horse, and the bottom half of a fish or dolphin. The hippocamp was said to pull the chariot of the sea god Poseidon. He sometimes even let Poseidon or nymphs called Nereids ride on him directly. (9)
Real-life seahorses look somewhat like the mythical Hippocamp. Because of this, scientists named the seahorse genus “Hippocampus.”
Why does the memory region of our brains also have this name? Because it, in turn, looks like a seahorse! It’s shaped like a letter C, with a chubby top and a long, curving tail.
Chimera
Next, we’re going to talk about the Chimera. Not the Camaro car. The Chimera, spelled C-H-I-M-E-R-A.
The Chimera was another monster from Greek mythology. Its name comes from the Greek word “khimaira,” meaning “she-goat.” (1) It was said to have the head and front legs of a lion, the body of a goat, and the hindquarters of a serpent, and it was sometimes also shown with the heads of all three animals set along its body.
In case you thought this ugly creature might get lonely, don’t worry. It had a lot of monstrous relatives. There was the Sphinx, with the head of a woman and the body of a winged lion; the Hydra, a serpent with many heads; Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the underworld; and in some versions, the Nemean Lion, who terrorized the people of Nemea before being killed by Hercules. (9) Depending on which ancient version you read, some of these creatures were the Chimera’s siblings and others were its offspring.
Because the Chimera was such a fanciful creature — it was made of three different animals, after all — its name came to suggest “the impossible.” Today, it refers to an illusion, or an unrealizable dream. For example, a pessimist might say that having all humanity get along peacefully is just a chimera.
Recently, this word has taken on a new meaning closer to its roots. In biology, a “chimera” is an organism made of cells from two different individuals, and scientists can create chimeras that mix cells from two species by injecting stem cells from one species into the embryo of another. (2) One goal of this research is to grow human organs in animals to help sick people who are waiting for organ transplants. But the technology is still experimental and people still debate the ethics of creating chimeras with both human and animal cells.
Behemoth
Let’s move on to something more straightforward. The behemoth. You might have used this word in the past to describe something really big. For example, Amazon is known as a “marketing behemoth”; Apple, a “tech behemoth.”
The word comes from a Hebrew word meaning “beast.” And that in turn may have come from the Egyptian word for water ox — their name for the hippopotamus. (1)
This monster is referred to in Hebrew, Christian, and Muslim texts. (9) The King James Bible describes it as having a tail that “moveth like a cedar,” bones like bars of iron, and a mouth that can consume an entire river. In medieval Arabic legend, the creature is called “Bahamut,” and depicted as a giant fish supporting a giant bull, which in turn supports the entire earth. (3)
How giant? The 19th-century writer Edward Lane put it like this: “If all the seas were placed in one of its nostrils, they would appear like a grain of mustard-seed in the midst of a desert.” (4) Now that’s a behemoth.
Gargantuan
Finally, another good way to say that something is really big is to say that it’s “gargantuan.” This word came into English through French. That’s because in the 1500s, the French author Rabelais wrote a series of books about two giants: Gargantua and his son Pantagruel.
According to Rabelais, Gargantua spent 11 months in his mother’s belly. He then came out through her left ear, shouting, “a drink, a drink, a drink!” His throat was so large that his father exclaimed “how big yours is.” That’s “que grand tu as” in French. The people around him decided that the baby’s name should therefore be “Gargantua,” which sounds a lot like “que grand tu as.” (8) He may have gotten that joke from the Spanish and Portuguese word “garganta,” which means “gullet or throat,” according to Etymonline. (12)
The myth of Gargantua predates Rabelais, and some folklorists believe Gargantua grew out of older Celtic legends and spread through France and Great Britain. (7) And the myth still lingers in France and nearby regions. In Italy’s Aosta Valley, a long glacial ridge is said to be Gargantua’s buried little finger.” And there are valleys in the Loire region that are said to have been carved out when Gargantua threw a giant rock.
And of course, his name lives on today in the adjective “gargantuan,” which means enormous or monstrous.
So, there you go. Some normal-sounding words are based on monsters from mythology. Happy Halloween!
That segment was written by Samantha Enslen, who runs DragonflyEditorial. You can find her at dragonflyeditorial.com.
(1) Dent, Susie. Behemoth, Chimera, . Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 19th ed. Chambers Harrap, 2012.
(2) Greshko, Michael. National Geographic. Sheep-Human Hybrids Made in Lab—Get the Facts. Published February 18, 2018. Accessed September 12, 2018.
(3) King James Bible online, Job 40:15-24. Accessed September 12, 2018.
(4) Lane, Edward William. Arabian Society in the Middle Ages: Studies from The Thousand and One Nights. Cosmography, page 107. Chatto, 1883.
(5) Neuroscientifically challenged. Know your brain: Hippocampus. Published May 26, 2014. Accessed September 11, 2018.
(6) Oxford English Dictionary, online edition. Oxford University Press. Chimera, Behemoth, Gargantuan, Hippocampus (subscription required, accessed September 12, 2018).
(7) Phideaux, W.F. Gargantua in England, Notes and Queries. In The Bookmart, Volume 4, June 1886 to May 1887. Bookmart Publishing Co., 1887.
(8) Rabelais, Francois. The Very Horrific Life of Great Gargantua, Father of Pantagruel. Page 21, in The Complete Works of Francois Rabelais, Translated by Donald M. Frame. University of California Press, 1991.
(9) Rose, Carol. Chimera, Behemoth, Gargantua, Hippocamp. Giants, Monsters, and Dragons: An Encyclopedia of Folklore, Legend, and Myth. ABC-CLIO, 1990.
(10) Walsh, William Shepard. Gargantua. Heroes and Heroines of Fiction: Classical, Mediæval, Legendary. J.B. Lippincott Company, 1915.
(11) Harper, Douglas. Behemoth. Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/behemoth. Accessed October 18, 2026.
(12) (11) Harper, Douglas. Gargantuan. Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/gargantuan. Accessed October 18, 2026.
‘Graveyard’ Versus ‘Cemetery’
by Mignon Fogarty
Graveyards and cemeteries are both places where we bury our dead, but technically, they have slightly different meanings.
“Cemetery” is the much older word in English, and its Latin root goes back to Roman times. Today, a cemetery is a large burial ground, typically not associated with a church.
Etymonline dates the word “graveyard” back to 1683, and a graveyard is typically smaller than a cemetery and is often associated with a church as part of the churchyard.
“Cemetery” appears to be the more commonly used word today, perhaps because it’s been around longer, perhaps because people like the sound of it better, or perhaps because there are so many more people buried in cemeteries because they’re so much bigger than graveyards. It was actually the population growth in Europe that led to the creation of large cemeteries. The small churchyards couldn’t hold all the dead anymore. So I’m inclined to think their popularity as a resting place is also the reason the word is more popular.
And here’s a bonus — do you know why sailors called the late shift the “graveyard watch”? It’s not because you feel like you’re going to die, although that may be true while you’re adjusting to the odd hours. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, sailors called the shift from midnight to 4:00 a.m. the middle watch or the graveyard watch because of the silence and because of the number of disasters that occurred during these wee hours.
And that’s your quick and dirty tip: Most people don’t know the difference between a cemetery and a graveyard, and not all dictionaries even call out a difference. So you’re not likely to be criticized for using them wrong. But if you want to feel precise, you can use the word “cemetery” when you prowl around a large urban burial ground and “graveyard” when you linger in the burial ground next to a small country church.
Familect
Finally, I have a familect from Robin.
Hello, Mignon. This is Robin Lomax from Sugar Hill, Georgia, and I wanted to send you a message about a family word that we’ve used for years, that was actually coined by me and my twin sister.
Apparently, this is a joke when we were little, that we had created our own language. And so our family word that we’ve used for years is the word “cold eye.”
So, being young, I doubt that we fully understood what the brain was. So we made up our own word for that pesky sensation that everybody refers to as “brain freeze.”
So, my entire family, including our husbands and children, refer to, well, what they refer to as “brain freeze” as “cold eye.” So, even when my little girl was young, I would tell her all the time like, “Don’t eat that ice cream, eat that, you’re going to get a cold eye.” And now all of my family uses it, and I love when I forget not to call it brain freeze and I still call it a “cold eye.” People look at me so funny until I explain it to them and then they’re like, “Yeah, I got it. It makes sense because it’s a sensation that you get behind your eye after you eat something cold.” So, that is our little Lomax family word. Thanks so much.
Thanks, Robin. “Cold eye” describes that sensation well! I appreciate the call.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Nat Hoopes; Morgan Christianson; Rebekah Sebastian; Maram Elnagheeb; Steven Schapansky; Holly Hutchings; and Dan Feierabend, who made his son watch the Stanley Kubrick movie “Dr. Strangelove” to explain the references in the “Fallout” series on Amazon.
And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
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