The Origins of the Juggernaut

People deploy the word juggernaut to describe anyone or anything that seems unstoppable, powerful, dominant. The Golden State Warriors, the recent National Basketball Association champions, are a juggernaut. National Economic Council director Gary Cohn is a “policymaking juggernaut.” Online retailer Amazon is also a juggernaut. Tennis player Roger Federer is a juggernaut at Wimbledon. In Marvel Comics there is a supervillain named Juggernaut that possess seemingly infinite strength and invincibility. The word, with its double hard g's in the middle and the same final syllable as “astronaut,” is fun to say and connotes an individual bigger than our world. This makes sense because the word “juggernaut” is the product of the collision between two forces, an encounter between two worlds: the English-speaking West and India.