Word.ws English Dictionary

big brother

big brother noun: a sibling's older brother. Also the alternative form of Big Brother.

Noun (1)

big brother (plural big brothers)

  1. (childish, often) A sibling's older brother.
    • If you don't give me back my toys I'll tell my big brother!
  2. (figuratively) Something that is bigger in comparison.
    • While the little MTU Vee-12s in the Class 800 bi-mode generating units have lower overall emissions than their big brothers in the Class 43 IC125 power cars, in the case of CO₂, when you burn a litre of diesel fuel you get 2.8kg of CO₂. [a possible error in the original text]2019 October, Roger Ford, “WCP award - victory for DfT reactionaries”, in Modern Railways, page 32
  3. (figuratively) early mobile phones (in China)
    • Due to the size of Big Brother and the fact that people who used it were mostly big brothers in the business world, this thing quickly became a status symbol.2018 December, “Chinese Terminology: Big Brother”, in CGTN

Noun (2) capitalized: Big Brother

Big Brother (plural Big Brothers)

  1. Unwarranted, invasive, and discreet surveillance, especially of a people by its government.
    • Some people are worried about marketing calls at dinnertime or junk mail or spam, while others are more concerned about Big Brother.2002, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Web privacy with P3P, page 12
    • When one mentions the concepts of identity and governance in the same breath, a virtually autonomic response from many is the concern that a governmental big brother will soon be looking over their shoulders.2008, Bertrand du Castel, Timothy M. Jurgensen Computer Theology, page 314
  2. Any omnipresent authority or figurehead representing oppressive control.
    • Holonym: the System
    • In the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the height of public concern over the emergence of a Big Brother society, privacy activism shared features in common with some of the hard-line environmental campaigns of the 1990s.1999, Rebecca A. Grant, Colin John Bennett, Visions of privacy: policy choices for the digital age, page 244

Also used as

big brother is also the alternative form of Big Brother.

Forms of big brother

pluralbig brothers
pluralBig Brothers
alternative formbig brother

Origin of big brother

After the nominal leader of Oceania in the 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by British writer and journalist George Orwell.

Words formed from big brother

Questions about big brother

What does big brother mean?
Big brother means a sibling's older brother.
What part of speech is big brother?
Big brother is a noun.
What is the plural of big brother?
The plural of big brother is big brothers.

Words near big brother in the dictionary

  1. big brain
  2. Big Brake
  3. big break
  4. big breaks
  5. big bro
  6. big brother
  7. Big Brotherish
  8. big brotherism
  9. big brothers
  10. big brown bat
  11. big brown bats

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: big brother (page history and authors); Big Brother (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-big brother.wav.

Cite this entry: “big brother.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/big_brother. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.