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