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big fish eat little fish

big fish eat little fish proverb: bigger animals, people, and companies tend to eliminate, or at least dominate, those that are smaller.

Proverb

big fish eat little fish

  1. Bigger animals, people, and companies tend to eliminate, or at least dominate, those that are smaller.

Origin of big fish eat little fish

Calque of Chinese 大魚吃小魚 /大鱼吃小鱼 (dà yú chī xiǎo yú)

Questions about big fish eat little fish

What does big fish eat little fish mean?
Big fish eat little fish means bigger animals, people, and companies tend to eliminate, or at least dominate, those that are smaller.
What part of speech is big fish eat little fish?
Big fish eat little fish is a proverb.

Words near big fish eat little fish in the dictionary

  1. big final
  2. big finals
  3. big finger
  4. big fingers
  5. big fish
  6. big fish eat little fish
  7. big fish in a little pond
  8. big fish in a small pond
  9. big fish in little ponds
  10. big fish in small ponds
  11. big five

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: big fish eat little fish (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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