What’s the difference between でかい(イ形) and 巨大(ナ形)?


I know that one is an i-adjective and the other a na-adjective. But what’s the
difference in meaning? Or is it purely a grammatical difference.

I noticed that most of the time, when there are multiple words with a similar
(if not identical) meaning, there is a difference in connotation still.




でかい and 巨大 are rarely interchangeable, because they differ in both register
and scale.

でかい, though standard enough that I wouldn't necessarily call it "slang", is a
strictly casual expression that you would be extremely unlikely to see in
formal or official contexts. In terms of scale, it's not much different from
the standard 大きい, perhaps a little more emphatic.

巨大, on the other hand, is quite neutral in register, if anything a little more
towards the formal than the casual end of the scale (as is usually the case
with 漢語 versus 和語). It is, however, much more extreme in terms of scale,
indicating that something is truly overwhelmingly large. As such, it's
actually _also_ quite unlikely to appear in many formal/official contexts,
simply because formal texts tend not to be hyperbolic. It could certainly
appear in the likes of newspaper articles or prose descriptions in novels,
however, whereas でかい would be less likely to appear in these unless they were
written in a particularly casual style.

To draw parallels with English words relating to size, I'd say:

大きい ≈ big/large  
でかい ≈ huge  
巨大 ≈ gigantic/colossal




でかい and 巨大 are rarely interchangeable, because they differ in both register
and scale.

でかい, though standard enough that I wouldn't necessarily call it "slang", is a
strictly casual expression that you would be extremely unlikely to see in
formal or official contexts. In terms of scale, it's not much different from
the standard 大きい, perhaps a little more emphatic.

巨大, on the other hand, is quite neutral in register, if anything a little more
towards the formal than the casual end of the scale (as is usually the case
with 漢語 versus 和語). It is, however, much more extreme in terms of scale,
indicating that something is truly overwhelmingly large. As such, it's
actually _also_ quite unlikely to appear in many formal/official contexts,
simply because formal texts tend not to be hyperbolic. It could certainly
appear in the likes of newspaper articles or prose descriptions in novels,
however, whereas でかい would be less likely to appear in these unless they were
written in a particularly casual style.

To draw parallels with English words relating to size, I'd say:

大きい ≈ big/large  
でかい ≈ huge  
巨大 ≈ gigantic/colossal

