vast
Extremely large; stretching a very long way.
- A vast desert of golden sand rolled away to the horizon in every direction.
- The ocean is so vast that a ship can sail for weeks without ever seeing land.
Similar: huge, enormous, giant
vast or infinite?
Vast is huge but has an end somewhere. Infinite has no end at all.
Children often reach for infinite when they mean very, very big. The two words are close in feeling, but they measure different things.
Vast is about enormous size. The sea on a school trip to the coast looks vast, stretching as far as you can see, but it does have a far shore. A vast playing field still has a fence round it.
Infinite means there is no limit whatsoever. Counting numbers are infinite: however high you get, you can always add one more. When a writer says a teacher has infinite patience, they are exaggerating on purpose, which is exactly why the word sounds so strong.
Both words, side by side
infinite
Without any end or limit.
- The list of counting numbers is infinite: however big a number you think of, you can always add one more.
- The magic purse in the story held an infinite number of coins, so it never ran out, no matter how many were spent.
Similar: endless, limitless
Why it costs marks
In an odd-one-out or closest-meaning question, infinite may sit beside words like endless and limitless, while vast sits with huge and immense. Treating them as the same word makes it hard to see which group each belongs to.
Definitions and example sentences on this page are the ones a child sees inside Wordrealm, taken from our list of over 1,100 words. It is free to browse, with nothing to sign up for.
Sitting the 11+ in Kent, Medway or Buckinghamshire?
Plain-English guides to each test, from the councils’ own pages: Kent Test · Medway Test · Bucks Secondary Transfer Test