Origin: 1802
Until the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, mammoth had been just the name of a huge extinct elephant-like creature whose bones had been discovered in many places on the continent. It was a Russian name, borrowed into English in the previous century for a similar animal whose remains had been found in Siberia. Jefferson was especially fond of our mammoth because it showed the superiority of nature in America over the runty creatures of Europe.
When he moved into the President's House--later known as the White House (1811)--in Washington in 1801, President Jefferson remarked that the large unfinished east room was big enough to hold a mammoth. And when the farmers of Cheshire, Massachusetts, in honor of the new president, used the milk of 900 "Republican cows" to create a cheese weighing 1200 pounds and delivered it to him on New Year's Day in 1802, he put it in that mammoth room of the President's House. To observers, it seemed like a mammoth cheese indeed. Mammoth thus became generalized as a word of great size, suited to the rapidly expanding nation. Appropriately, Jefferson had the mammoth cheese served on July 4, 1803, in celebration of the Louisiana Purchase, a mammoth addition to American territory.
In a non-election peacetime year, the mammoth cheese was big news. And thanks to the cheese, the long-extinct mammoth came to life in the popular imagination. A baker offered "Mammoth bread" for sale in 1802. In 1813, it was reported that "the Mammoth bank bill passed the senate this day on a third reading." In 1824, a Massachusetts newspaper declared, "The last load, as we Yankees say, was a 'Mammoth': ... producing an aggregate of nearly twelve cords."
By 1842, an English traveler writing about the Southern states could report "the custom of this country to call every thing very large by the epithet of 'mammoth'; so that one hears of a mammoth cake, a mammoth pie, a mammoth oyster." There are examples of a mammoth advertisement in 1883, a mammoth dam in 1907, and so on to the mammoth sales of the present day. No other North American animal, living or dead, has had such mammoth success as an adjective.
