мамонт

When Russian explorers pushed into Siberia, they encountered indigenous peoples who knew of enormous tusks and sometimes whole carcasses emerging from the permafrost. These peoples had various names for the creatures; the Russians heard something like 'mammont.'

The origin is debated: it may come from Mansi mang ont ('earth horn') or from a Yakut word. What's certain is that Siberians knew about these frozen giants long before European science did.

By the 1700s, 'mammoth' had entered European languages. When naturalists realized the tusks came from extinct elephants, the word was already established. 'Mammoth' became both the scientific name and a popular term for anything enormous.

Today 'mammoth' is an adjective: a mammoth task, mammoth undertaking. The prehistoric animal gave its name to any oversized challenge — appropriate for a creature that could weigh 12 tons.