Word.ws English Dictionary

big if

big if noun: an unlikely but necessary condition.

Noun

big if (plural big ifs)

  1. An unlikely but necessary condition.
    • "If I were only old enough," said Kate, "and knew enough to teach a day-school, I would begin at once and save half of my money …."
      "Oh!" Edward replied, "there's a big if in the way."1868 Montgomery Schuyler, The Pioneer Church: Or, The Story of a New Parish in the West (Boston: Riverside Press, 1868), p. 2
    • "If they believe us," said the admiral, "and that's a big if, then we're in a race with them to find this thing. Because if they grab it—"2004, Dale Brown, Dreamland: Strike Zone, HarperCollins, →ISBN, page 217

Forms of big if

pluralbig ifs

Questions about big if

What does big if mean?
Big if means an unlikely but necessary condition.
What part of speech is big if?
Big if is a noun.
What is the plural of big if?
The plural of big if is big ifs.

Words near big if in the dictionary

  1. big honkin'
  2. Big Horn County
  3. big house
  4. big house, little house, back house, barn
  5. big houses
  6. big if
  7. big if true
  8. big ifs
  9. big iron
  10. Big Island
  11. Big Jacks Creek

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: big if (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.

Last updated:

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