Why did we not stop at “big” and instead we now have “huge”, “massive”, “giagantic”, “large”, “enormous” etc?
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Maybe to add scale about what you’re describing ?
In the modern world, consultants play a big role. They have this huge need to largely express the same thing differently. They are massive fans of such adjectives and are generally tools of gigantic proportions.
Because they aren’t the same thing. Depending on the context, those words expressing size can mean different relative sizes depending on the word. They are intensifiers of a basic meaning.
For a similar reason, we have meaningless intensifiers like “very” and “damn”, which according to Mark Twain are interchangeable and your writing is improved if either one are removed. So “very big” is bigger than merely “big”, and “damn huge” is bigger still.
We do not really have a deterministic theory for how languages obtain their lexicons. It is a process that happens across many speakers all using language in unique ways and coordinating with each other.
We do know that languages have a lot of content besides the dictionary definitions of words. Big, huge, massive, gigantic, large, and enormous are approximately interchangeable, and yet speakers choose to use them in different circumstances. We call the sun massive or enormous more often than we call it big or large, and we don’t often call great danes gigantic even though they are quite big.
In English, it is often because many of our words are adopted from other languages. So we’ll have a word adopted from Germanic, French, and Latin all of which mean big. One of the reasons they have probably persisted so well is because they are rarely perfect synonyms, and often have subtly different connotations. A large coffee might be something I order at a cafe. A *giant* coffee sounds like a prank or specialist thing, right? If you go to your local place and order a *massive* coffee, it will be seen as comic exaggeration.
We have this in many areas. Describing a non-skinny person as fat vs plump vs curvy vs voluptuous vs junoesque (or modern day *thicc* ) all give very different senses for what we mean despite all ostensibly meaning the same thing. It gives a lot of space for nuance and subtlety.
This is too open-ended a question to get one simple answer for. It happens for lots of different reasons. Sometimes those synonyms have subtly different meanings, sometimes they used to mean different things and the meanings have converged, sometimes they’re from different dialects, sometimes they have different connotations of class or status, sometimes two words just enter the language independently and coexist.
One example I’m fond of is the way we talk about our bovine friends in English. Why do we have different words for a living cow versus its meat? We don’t have that for, say, chicken. The answer dates back to the Norman conquest, in which England came to be ruled by a bunch of French aristocrats, and English got a whole load of French poured into it. The word ‘beef’ entered English at this time, descended from the French ‘beuf’, which is a precursor to the modern-day ‘bouef’. But this usage was more common among those French aristocrats, who mostly encountered the animal in the context of beef: already slaughtered, prepared, and on the table for consumption. Whereas the English working shlubs who actually raised the animals for them kept using the old-English ‘cow’. The result is a bifurcated vocabulary of bovines!
(We actually do have this for chickens as ‘poultry’, it’s just less commonly seen. But again, we can blame the French, in the exact same way! ‘Poultry’ comes from the French ‘pouley’)
Languages are always evolving. New words get coined. Old words shift meaning. Words phase in and out of common usage.
Quite a lot of words in English come from Norman French. People who spoke it became the ruling class of England.
The Anglo-Saxons had the words “smell” for all kinds of smells, and “stink” for the bad ones. But when the ruling class introduced the word “odor” it gained a positive meaning, because they talked about perfume and nicely cooked food more than the average person. That is why “smelly” and “stinky” now share a meaning.
I’d argue that all those size related words you listed have slightly different meanings. A large piece of paper is easy to find, but an enormous one is a lot bigger.
Having words that have the same meaning but different uses is quite good. For example if I would say “It’s a five minute walk/ride/drive to the pub.” You already have some idea of what mode of transport I am talking about.
There’s also aesthetics to consider, some times you want to express a thought with a pleasing phrase. Speech is an art form as much as any other, and one that is more accessible than others.
They are not the same. New words may come when the old words are not enough. For example Eskimos had many words for “snow”. Because they see so much snow that they have a need to identify it further based on what kind of snow it is.
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