Word.ws English Dictionary

big business

big business noun: large, for-profit corporations collectively, understood as having significant economic, political, or social influence.

Noun (1)

big business (uncountable)

  1. (capitalized, sometimes) Large, for-profit corporations collectively, understood as having significant economic, political, or social influence.
    • The man in the sandwich board was railing against big business and big government.
    • Because he is liberal, temperate and articulate, and because he freely recognizes past Big Business abuses, Wendell L. Willkie, president of huge Commonwealth & Southern Corp., is in a class by himself as a persuasive businessman-critic of the New Deal. . . . "Today it is not Big Business that we...1940 March 18, “Life on the Newsfronts of the World: Big Government”, in Life, retrieved 13 Dec 2011, page 26
  2. A large and vital economic sector.
    • In those days, cotton mills were big business around here, and so was tanning of hides.

Noun (2) capitalized: Big Business

Big Business (uncountable)

  1. (alternative) Alternative form of big business.

Examples of big business in a sentence

  • Because he is liberal, temperate and articulate, and because he freely recognizes past Big Business abuses, Wendell L.1940 March 18, “Life on the Newsfronts of the World: Big Government”, in Life, retrieved 13 Dec 2011, page 26:
  • "Invariably, people see this as a conspiracy between the government and big business," says legislator Alan Leong.2005 January 17, Chaim Estulin, “Hong Kong's New Culture”, in Time:

Questions about big business

What does big business mean?
Big business means large, for-profit corporations collectively, understood as having significant economic, political, or social influence.
How do you use big business in a sentence?
Because he is liberal, temperate and articulate, and because he freely recognizes past Big Business abuses, Wendell L.
What part of speech is big business?
Big business is a noun.

Words near big business in the dictionary

  1. big brothers
  2. big brown bat
  3. big brown bats
  4. big bucks
  5. Big Burn
  6. big business
  7. big C
  8. big car
  9. big cars
  10. big casino
  11. big cassino

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: big business (page history and authors); Big Business (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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Cite this entry: “big business.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/big_business. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.