He came into the office to complain and received an apology from another person. He went away happy.

Enormity did not mean big, or even huge, although some people, even dictionaries, are now accepting enormity to mean huge.

The Bloomsbury Good Word Guide, for instance, said “enormity is frequently used as though it meant enormousness but, although this usage is now acceptable in American English, most careful users if British English still dislike it”.

Enormity is a funny word. Most of us would accept it to mean huge. 

But the Macquarie says it means “a very wicked act”, Webster says it means “a very grave offence against order”, Collins says it means “a terrible crime or sin”, and so the list goes on.

Dictionary.com said “the bombing of the defenceless population was an enormity beyond belief”.

My problem with dictionaries is that rather than educating us on what words mean, they are telling us how we are using words. But maybe that is what dictionaries are for. Otherwise, dictionaries would have gone out of fashion centuries ago.

Enormity came into our language at least 700 years ago, but even then people were having difficulty with this word. My big dictionary says that in those days it meant “extraordinarily wicked, outrageous, monstrous”. But people were also using it to mean “deviating from the ordinary”.

The problem seems to have arisen when the word enormous changed over the years from meaning abnormal to huge, but enormity did not follow. So maybe enormous is at fault.

Enormous originally meant deviating from ordinary rule, monstrous shocking, but over the years drifted to huge, or extending beyond the limits set for it.

You don’t want to know similarities between the word abnormal and enormous. It would put you to sleep.

The earliest use in print that I could find came in 1545 when a person talked about “enormious sins”. It was commonly spelt as enormious.

Enorm means to make monstrous, but enorm also means of sins and crimes, abnormally wicked, monstrous, outrageous.

Enormously means “abnormally, eccentrally, irregularly, lawlessly, criminally, immorally”. Couldn’t you have fun with that one.

What about enormousness? “Divergence from a right moral standard, in a stronger sense gross wickedness, heinousness”.

I’m starting to think we need a word that simply means big, without any confusion. Big, or even huge, sounds about right.