big one

noun

Definition of big one

1 informal : a thousand dollars The house in the background, we bought it for 70 grand in 1967, it would go for two hundred big ones now, easy …— John Updike

2 informal : an extravagant lie : whopper Talking about lying, I thought, I had just told a big one.— Elizabeth Chandler

3 the big one or less commonly the Big One : an extremely large and destructive earthquake … the prediction that the Big One may come in December is triggering tremors up and down the Mississippi Valley.— Michael J. McCarthy

Examples of big one in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Although all brands had the same chance at being seen, bigger ones triggered emotional reactions more quickly. — Nat Ives, WSJ, "Mobile Ads Do More Work in One Second Than You Might Think," 6 Mar. 2019 The company has battled with multiple privacy violations this year, including the big one in which 87 million users possibly had their information shared with Cambridge Analytica, a political group aligned with President Trump, in March. — David Grossman, Popular Mechanics, "Facebook's Latest Fail Allowed Unauthorized Access to the Photos of 6.8 Million Users," 14 Dec. 2018 And making Centaur 3 into 5, and then the bigger one. — Eric Berger, Ars Technica, "Getting Vulcan up to speed: Part one of our interview with Tory Bruno," 11 Dec. 2018 No matter what happens though, season 14 is going to be a big one. — Kayla Keegan, Good Housekeeping, "Did Matt and Amy Roloff of 'Little People Big World' Actually Sell Their Farm?," 15 Mar. 2019 The biggest ones, like Lightning in a Bottle (LIB for short), are well-organized, professionally run events with massive stages, big-name headliners and VIP glamping packages that can cost upwards of $1,500. — Andy Hermann, Los Angeles Magazine, "“Transformational” Music Festivals Are Becoming a Year-Round Lifestyle," 31 May 2018 For example, 20 years ago, those simulations spawned swarms of small dark matter haloes around the bigger ones, which suggested that a galaxy like our Milky Way should be surrounded by hundreds of dwarf satellite galaxies. — Adrian Cho, Science | AAAS, "Galaxy simulations are at last matching reality—and producing surprising insights into cosmic evolution," 30 May 2018 Older, larger fish have higher levels of mercury and PCBs because those contaminants are passed up food chains, from smaller species to bigger ones. — Michael Casey, The Seattle Times, "EPA decision soon on chemical compounds tied to health risks," 12 Feb. 2019 Small metros lose out to big ones in gaining graduates, but some buck the trend. — Laura Kusisto, WSJ, "Fed Says Student Debt Has Hurt the U.S. Housing Market," 16 Jan. 2019

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'big one.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.