Word.ws English Dictionary

big lie

big lie noun: the policy or practice of insistently making a false claim which is so emphatic and grandiose that listeners and readers will reckon that the claim must be true because no one would dare to fabricate something so forceful and extravagant; a false claim produced by the application of this policy or practice.

Noun (1)

big lie (plural big lies)

  1. (often politics or public policy, often preceded by the) The policy or practice of insistently making a false claim which is so emphatic and grandiose that listeners and readers will reckon that the claim must be true because no one would dare to fabricate something so forceful and extravagant; a false claim produced by the application of this policy or practice.
    • In an interview, Lewis Brandon, the institute's director, said of reports of the Holocaust: “It's a myth, using the big lie technique, perpetrated solely to give the Zionists a shield against criticism of Israel and to justify massive American aid to Israel.”1981 March 11, Robert Lindsey, quoting Lewis Brandon, “Auschwitz survivor sues for prize for proving Germans gassed Jews”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 10 Mar 2022
    • This is the big lie of contemporary art: not nothing being passed off as something, but the make-believe that the division between high and low has been destroyed and that we're all now capable of being artists.2008 February 23, Howard Jacobson, “Why mock the expectation of beauty in art?”, in The Independent, archived from the original on 24 Jan 2025, retrieved 17 Jul 2014

Noun (2) capitalized: Big Lie

Big Lie (plural Big Lies)

  1. Alternative letter-case form of big lie.
    • When other panel members, after inspecting your evidence, reject your thesis, you claim that they did so for ideological reasons. […] Soon, the echo chamber you created drowns out dissenting views; even presidential candidates begin repeating the Big Lie.2011 December 24, Joe Nocera, “The Big Lie”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 12 Nov 2020
    • First, we must do everything possible to ensure that China, and its contemporaneous disinformation campaign about the origin of the virus, will not succeed in proving that the Big Lie technique is alive and well in the twenty-first century.2020, John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened, Simon & Schuster, →ISBN

Examples of big lie in a sentence

  • The big lie told repeatedly about the war in Afghanistan is that the international security assistance force (Isaf) and the Afghan national security forces are pushing the Taliban back.2012 February 1, “Afghanistan: the big lie”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 25 Nov 2020, retrieved 17 Jul 2014:
  • For Henry Poulaille, cinemas were the vendors par excellence of modern capitalism’s big lie, the “fantasy of a redistribution of wealth,” of upward mobility […]2015, Jesse Cohn, Underground Passages, AK Press, →ISBN:
  • "They're part of the big lie, the big lie."2021 January 16, Melissa Block, quoting Joe Biden, “Can The Forces Unleashed By Trump's Big Election Lie Be Undone?”, in NPR, archived from...

Forms of big lie

pluralbig lies
alternative formBig Lie
pluralBig Lies

Origin of big lie

Reportedly from a remark by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, that a big lie is more likely to be believed than a small lie.

Questions about big lie

What does big lie mean?
Big lie means the policy or practice of insistently making a false claim which is so emphatic and grandiose that listeners and readers will reckon that the claim must be true because no one would dare to fabricate something so forceful and extravagant; a false claim produced by the application of this policy or practice.
How do you use big lie in a sentence?
The big lie told repeatedly about the war in Afghanistan is that the international security assistance force (Isaf) and the Afghan national security forces are pushing the Taliban back.
What part of speech is big lie?
Big lie is a noun.
What is the plural of big lie?
The plural of big lie is big lies.

Words near big lie in the dictionary

  1. big leagues
  2. big letter
  3. big letters
  4. big lick
  5. big licks
  6. big lie
  7. big lies
  8. big light
  9. big lug
  10. big lugs
  11. Big Mac

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: big lie (page history and authors); Big Lie (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 lie.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/big_lie. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.