Here is a comprehensive summary of the article on giants:

Giants—humanoid beings of prodigious size and strength—trace their name to the Greek gigantes, entering English in 1297 via Robert of Gloucester's chronicle. While fairy tales like Jack the Giant Killer cemented their image as dimwitted, violent ogres, modern authors such as Jonathan Swift and Roald Dahl have reimagined them as intelligent and friendly. In folklore, giants often evoke terror and mortality, yet some intermingle with humans—like the Irish hero Fionn mac Cumhaill, said to have built the Giant's Causeway, or the American Paul Bunyan, who, though invented by advertisers, was enthusiastically adopted as a folk figure. Historically, fossilized remains of ancient megafauna fueled giant lore, from Herodotus's report of Orestes' bones to the 1613 French discovery attributed to Teutobochus, which sparked a pamphlet war among anatomists, and the Claverack Giant in colonial New York, studied by Cotton Mather and Edward Taylor. In Abrahamic tradition, the Nephilim of Genesis are loosely translated as "giants," though they are said to have been destroyed in Noah's Flood yet appear again afterward.