sleeping giant

A metaphor, maybe derived from Gulliver's Travels (1726),[1] and made popular by the 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora!, see quotations.

• Audio (AU)

  (file)

sleeping giant (plural sleeping giants)

1. (idiomatic) Someone or something with great, latent strength.
   • 1926 June, C.E. Mahaffey, “The Sleeping Giant in Education”, in The Educational Screen, volume 5, page 335:

     There is a sleeping giant in education that is just beginning to awaken.

   • 1970, Tora! Tora! Tora!, spoken by Isoroku Yamamoto:

     I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.

   • 2008, BioWare, Mass Effect, Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →ISBN, →OCLC, PC, scene: Systems Alliance: Military Doctrine Codex entry:

     The Council regards the Alliance as a sleeping giant. Less than 3% of humans volunteer to serve in their military, a lower proportion than any other species.

   • 2010 April 30, Sophia Tareen for the Associated Press, “Anger over Ariz. immigration law drives US rallies”, in USA Today‎, archived from the original on 2010-05-01:

     Angered by a controversial Arizona immigration law, tens of thousands of protesters […] rallied in cities nationwide […] .
     "I want to thank the governor of Arizona because she's awakened a sleeping giant," said labor organizer John Delgado, who attended a rally in New York where authorities estimated 6,500 gathered.

   • 2012 September, Tom Zoellner, “The Myth of the Latino Vote”, in The Atlantic‎:

     Bruce Merrill, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University who has worked as an Arizona pollster for four decades, is skeptical that the Latino “sleeping giant” will wake anytime soon.

   • 2022 March 1, Noah Barkin, “Europe’s Sleeping Giant Awakens”, in The Atlantic‎:

     Europe’s Sleeping Giant Awakens [title, referring to Germany]

• let sleeping dogs lie

• “sleeping giant”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.