as in bigs
the highest level of a field of endeavor
when you've landed a tenure-track position at that university, you're playing in the major leagues
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Recent Examples of major leagues
Baseball has been slower than most major leagues to bring women into its officiating ranks.
—
Kim Elsesser, Forbes.com, 8 Aug. 2025
Kim Elsesser, Forbes.com, 8 Aug. 2025
Recent Examples of Synonyms for major leagues
Noun
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She’s tasked with slowing down top opposing bigs, and her versatility and willingness to defend some of the league’s best is key to freeing up Collier on both ends.—
Ben Pickman,
New York Times,
11 Sep. 2025
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Waiving Bradley without seeing how healthy those two bigs are would be irresponsible.—
Tony East,
Forbes.com,
25 Aug. 2025
Noun
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For the first time in a summer transfer window, spending on new signings by England’s top 20 clubs outstripped that of those in the other four big leagues — Serie A, La Liga, the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 — combined.—
James McNicholas,
New York Times,
8 Sep. 2025
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That 2022 validation — Nvidia invested about $900 million into the company, now worth more than $2 billion — launched CoreWeave into the AI big leagues with access to the chipmaker’s most advanced products to build the powerful data centers used to serve and train many of OpenAI’s models.—
Reed Albergotti,
semafor.com,
27 Aug. 2025
Cite this Entry
“Major leagues.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/major%20leagues. Accessed 30 Sep. 2025.
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