big history
big history noun: an academic discipline which examines history from the Big Bang to the present.
Noun (1)
big history (countable and uncountable, plural big histories)
- An academic discipline which examines history from the Big Bang to the present.
- And for the last 20 years or so, the historians David Christian and Fred Spier have championed big history, urging their colleagues to begin their once-upon-a-time accounts billions of years ago, with the big bang.2011 September 26, Patricia Cohen, “History That’s Written in Beads as Well as in Words”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
- Fans of Big History want to put geology and the climate at the centre of the subject, alongside other branches of science and technology. They believe it is essential to show that the course of human life has been altered by both natural and manmade factors.2012 October 27, Vanessa Thorpe, “Big History theories pose latest challenge to traditional curriculum”, in The Observer
Noun (2) capitalized: Big History
Big History (usually uncountable, plural Big Histories)
- Alternative letter-case form of big history.
Examples of big history in a sentence
- Big History’s claims to a dramatic new departure seem, in fact, to amount to a superficial re-labelling of most school subjects as “history” in an attempt to link them.2014 September 10, Katherine Edwards, “Why the Big History project funded by Bill Gates is alarming”, in The Guardian:
- Big history did not spring out of some historical vacuum.2019, Craig Benjamin, Esther Quaedackers, David Baker, editors, The Routledge Companion to Big History, Routledge, →ISBN, page 3:
Forms of big history
| plural | big histories |
|---|---|
| alternative form | Big History |
| plural | Big Histories |
Origin of big history
Coined by historian David Christian.
Questions about big history
- What does big history mean?
- Big history means an academic discipline which examines history from the Big Bang to the present.
- How do you use big history in a sentence?
- Big History’s claims to a dramatic new departure seem, in fact, to amount to a superficial re-labelling of most school subjects as “history” in an attempt to link them.
- What part of speech is big history?
- Big history is a noun.
- What is the plural of big history?
- The plural of big history is big histories.
Words near big history in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: big history (page history and authors); Big History (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 history.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/big_history. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.