Why did we not stop at “big” and instead we now have “huge”, “massive”, “giagantic”, “large”, “enormous” etc?
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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’)
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