The English word "jumbo," meaning "exceptionally large," is named after a single individual animal: a male African elephant called Jumbo who was the star attraction first of London Zoo and later of Barnum's circus in the United States. Before the 1860s, "jumbo" was not an English word at all. By the 1890s, it had become a generic adjective for almost anything oversized.
A Real Elephant
Jumbo was captured in Sudan as a calf around 1860, sold first to a Paris zoo, then in 1865 to London Zoo. He grew to be the largest elephant in captivity — eventually around 12 feet at the shoulder — and London children rode on his back by the thousand. His name may have come from a West African word for an elephant, or from jumbo, an English slang term for "a large clumsy person" already in mild use; nobody is now entirely sure.
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Sold to Barnum
In 1882, the American showman P. T. Barnum bought Jumbo from London Zoo for $10,000 — an enormous sum at the time. The British public was outraged. Children wrote tearful letters to The Times, Queen Victoria intervened (unsuccessfully), and the sale dominated London newspapers for weeks. The word "Jumbomania" was coined for the phenomenon. When Jumbo finally sailed to New York, he had become globally famous before he had walked off the ship.
From Proper Noun to Adjective
It was at this point — the 1882 sale and the press frenzy that followed — that "jumbo" stopped being only a name and started being an adjective. American newspapers used it for any oversized object: a "jumbo cigar," a "jumbo orange." By 1900, the word was entirely detached from the elephant. Jumbo himself died in 1885, struck by a freight train in Canada. His skeleton went to the American Museum of Natural History; his hide was stuffed and toured for years. The word has outlived him by more than a century, and the underlying animal is almost forgotten.
The most modern descendant of his name is the jumbo jet — a term coined for the Boeing 747 in 1969, when it was by far the largest commercial aircraft ever built. Jumbo's ghost is still working.