What's large about the Large Hadron Collider?

In Connolly's "The Gates", the narrator says, rather superciliously, "The Large Hadron Collider is, as the name suggests, large." I realised that I had always thought of it as the (Large Hadron) Collider, since its goal is to discover extremely massive particles, rather than the Large (Hadron Collider). CERN says "The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator", which suggests that my interpretation is wrong. (Also, there is the "Large Electron–Positron Collider", which, since 'large electron' is meaningless, must clearly be a "Large (Electron–Positron Collider)".) Does anyone know for sure?

The "large" refers to the machine, not to the hadrons. The name was chosen in 1984, and the "large" part was carried over from the "Large Electron-Positron Collider", in whose tunnel the LHC was built (the LHC was the successor to the LEPC)

Presumably since they were calling the old machine "large", they kept that part of the name when they expanded it into the new machine.

I'm not sure about this, but i suspect the "large" was originally added to the LEPC's name simply due to the enormous scale of the tunnels, which were far bigger than anything that had ever been built to date. If there were other electron-positron colliders, then the addition of "large" would make the LEPC seem more unique, and thus more attractive as a funding proposition.

The planned (and at this time totally hypothetical) successor to the LHC has the working title of "The Very Large Hadron Collider". Obviously, the hadrons themselves won't be getting any larger.

EDIT - if you're interested in the history of the LHC and the hunt for the Higgs Boson, then I can highly recommend a book called "The Particle At The End Of The Universe", by Sean Carroll.

The large hadron collider is called that because it collides hadrons and is large, not because it collides large hadrons, and not because it was designed to produce large hadrons in its collisions. The particles it is looking for are not necessarily hadrons; one of its primary goals was to find the Higgs boson, which is not a hadron.

In fact, what it collides these days is usually protons, which are among the smaller hadrons. However, protons are not the limits of its capability. Wikipedia says that it has also collided lead nuclei, and it could presumably be configured to collide arbitrary nuclei. Since nuclei are composed of neutrons and protons, which are hadrons, it's a Large (Hadron Collider).