If languages can be said to have sizes, English is clearly one of the jumbos. Maybe the biggest, largest, greatest, most enormous, sizable, grandest, most immense, massive, gigantic, grand, and generous jumbo of them all. It’s got hundreds of thousands of words, after all. One way it got so big is by having multiple words that mean the same basic thing. Like, for example, jumbo.
As English words for considerable size go, jumbo might be the newest. As far as anybody knows, it’s only been around for a couple of hundred years. You might guess that it was a slang word, and the oldest printed example would agree — “jumbo” appeared in the first edition, in 1823, of Slang: a dictionary of the turf, the ring, the chase, the pit, of bon-ton, and the varieties of life. It was written by John Badcock, but he published his dictionary under the pen name Jon Bee. And the definition of jumbo in his dictionary was “a clumsy or unwieldy fellow,” and agreed that the word was slang.
It wasn’t the sort of dictionary that offered any etymology or history, and as slang it was spoken a lot more than it was printed. The result of that is that nobody nowadays knows where it came from. All we have is a guess that maybe it had something to do with the phrase “mumbo-jumbo,” but as guesses go, that one is not particularly educated.
Jumbo has mostly been a noun. A person was called a jumbo back in the 1820s when they were clumsy, and that stayed constant for several decades.At some point it also applied to old ships, which might also have been clumsy. Knickerbocker Magazine printed this in 1846: “Take the helm and bear away for that jumbo…And so we walk to the ‘jumbo,’ an old-time schooner.”
It wasn’t until the 1880s that “jumbo’ started to imply large size, and that seems to be because P.T. Barnum bought an elephant as an attraction for his traveling circus. The elephant was named Jumbo. But not because the elephant was clumsy. At the time, “jumbo” had acquired another meaning, as explained by the Philadelphia Evening Star in 1882: “‘Jumbo is a new gray hue.” Elephants are gray (or jumbo), and it was Jumbo the elephant who added the notion of size to jumbo the word.
At about the same time (1880s), a jumbo was also a piece of wood used to dig clams out of the sand. In the first half of the 20th Century, “jumbo” was used by sailors to mean a kind of sail (and maybe it still is, but the most recent citation I could find is from 1956, so sails might not be jumbos any more).
Jumbo has become a pretty common word in commercial use, and it always implies size, whether it’s a jumbo jet, a jumbo-sized soft drink, the oxymoronic “jumbo shrimp,” or a Jumbotron in a sports arena. As for the real Jumbo, he was the star attraction in Barnum’s circus for three years, but died after being hit by a train in a railroad yard in Ontario, Canada. The elephant was stuffed by a team of taxidermists, and Barnum exhibited the taxidermic pachyderm for another two years. He finally donated it to Tufts University, which had a P.T. Barnum Hall to display it. A thankful Tufts University made Jumbo their mascot — but there was a fire in 1975 and the stuffed elephant was destroyed. Some ashes, supposedly the ashes of the elephant, are kept even today in a peanut butter jar in the office of the University athletic director. It’s a Peter Pan Peanut Butter jar. Jumbo size.
