Other forms: biggest, bigger
Big means large in size. An elephant is big and a mouse is not; a big suitcase, a big slice of cake, the big house at the end of the road.
Big goes far beyond size. It means important — a big decision, the big match, a big name in music. It means grown up: your big sister is the older one, and the child at the dentist is told to be a big boy about it. Big on something means keen on it, and big-headed means far too pleased with yourself. English prefers big in speech and large in writing, and some nouns take only one — a large coffee, a big mistake, and neither swaps comfortably. The comparative doubles the g: bigger, biggest.
1adjectivebigLarge in size or amount.
“They live in a big house with a red door.”
2adjectivemajorImportant or serious.
“Tomorrow is a big day for her.”
synonyms: major, significant
3adjectivegrownOlder, or grown up.
“My big brother taught me to ride a bike.”
4adjectivepopularPopular or very successful.
“The band was big in Germany years before anyone here noticed.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Also accepted in games: large
Big appears in northern Middle English as bigge, meaning powerful or strong; Old English had no such word, and it was probably carried in by Norse speakers. Further back it may come from a Germanic root meaning swollen up and thick, from an ancient root for swelling. If that is right, big is a distant relative of bug and bugbear.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰew-
Proto-Germanic
*bugja- — swollen up, thick
enm-nor
big
English, today
big
Built from
enm-nor big, bigge (“powerful, strong”), possibly from a dialect of Old Norse -. Ultimately perhaps a derivative of Proto-Germanic bugja- (“swollen up, thick”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰew-, bu- (“to swell”), in which case big would be related to bogey, bugbear, and bug. Compare dialectal Norwegian bugge (“great man”), Low German Bögge, Boggelmann.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA