Meanings
plural megamachines
- A very large or powerful machine (or computer).
1 more example
In the early days of the Large Hadron Collider, when the megamachine kept running into seemingly endless, and increasingly improbable, financial and technical snags, some researchers—calling these mishaps “anti-miracles”—even half-seriously proposed that the universe was censoring us from this sort of destruction of the world occasioned by a successful run of the collider.
2018 March 15, Peter Brannen, “Why Earth's History Appears So Miraculous”, in The Atlantic, archived from the original on 16 Jul 2025 - human sciencesThe convergence of science, economy, technics, and political power.
The megamachine, as he termed it, engendered a bogus existence—material, intellectual and spiritual—that reduced human endeavor to a series of ciphers.
1990 January 27, “Lewis Mumford Dies at 94; A Visionary Social Critic”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 28 Jan 2026
Origin
From mega- + machine. In the social science sense coined by American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology and literary critic Lewis Mumford.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
megamachine. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/megamachine
“megamachine.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/megamachine. Accessed November 2, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “megamachine,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/megamachine.
Source: megamachine on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.