Word.ws English Dictionary

big money

big money noun: a large amount of money, especially a significant source of revenue or income.

Noun

big money (uncountable)

  1. (idiomatic, informal) A large amount of money, especially a significant source of revenue or income.
    • When people see puppies going for the cost of vaccinations at animal shelters, and then hear about ones that sell for $500, they think big money is to be had in dog breeding.2011, Steve Gillman, 101 Weird Ways to Make Money, page 143
  2. (idiomatic, informal) Large corporations, the people who run them, or corporate interest generally, seen as exerting political influence and prioritising profits over other political concerns.
    • Republicans push Big Government to raise cash from one religious sect, but stomp on Big Government antitrust measures that prevent big money control of illegal monopolistic corporations like Wal-Mart and Microsoft.2011, Rick Martin, No Money!: The Surviving Middle Class American, page 31
    • To oversimplify a bit[…]the [Bernie] Sanders view is that money is the root of all evil. Or more specifically, the corrupting influence of big money, of the 1 percent and the corporate elite, is the overarching source of the political ugliness we see all around us.2016 January 29, Paul Krugman, “Plutocrats and Prejudice”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

Adjective

big money (not comparable)

  1. (idiomatic, informal) Involving or transacting a large amount of money.
    • Unless their candidates can amass a considerable campaign chest, one assumed to come from big money donors, they do not stand a chance of winning.1997, David Reynolds, Democracy Unbound
    • The Blues, without new big-money signings Fernando Torres and David Luiz, relied on their old guard to dig them out of an early hole.2011 February 1, Saj Chowdhury, “Sunderland 2 - 4 Chelsea”, in BBC

Forms of big money

alternative formbig-money

Questions about big money

What does big money mean?
Big money means a large amount of money, especially a significant source of revenue or income.
What part of speech is big money?
Big money can be a noun or an adjective.

Words near big money in the dictionary

  1. big mitt man
  2. big mitt men
  3. big mo
  4. big momma
  5. big mommas
  6. big money
  7. big mood
  8. big moods
  9. Big Moose
  10. Big Mountain
  11. Big Mountain Mesa

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: big money (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 money.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/big_money. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.