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