Word.ws English Dictionary

big oil

big oil noun: the world's largest oil and gas companies (supermajors), understood as a business group having significant political, economic, or social power.

Noun (1)

big oil (uncountable)

  1. (derogatory) The world's largest oil and gas companies (supermajors), understood as a business group having significant political, economic, or social power.
    • Eight years after Kyoto, Big Oil and Big Coal remain in complete and unchallenged power.2005 May, Bill McKibben, “Climate of Denial”, in Mother Jones
    • It follows an inquiry launched by House Democrats in 2021, which focused on big oil’s alleged efforts to mislead the public about the climate crisis.2023 June 21, Dharna Noor, “Senate examines role of ‘dark money’ in delaying climate action”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

Noun (2) capitalized: Big Oil

Big Oil (uncountable)

  1. Alternative letter-case form of big oil.

Forms of big oil

alternative formBig Oil

Questions about big oil

What does big oil mean?
Big oil means the world's largest oil and gas companies (supermajors), understood as a business group having significant political, economic, or social power.
What part of speech is big oil?
Big oil is a noun.

Words near big oil in the dictionary

  1. big names
  2. big noise
  3. big noises
  4. big O
  5. big O notation
  6. big oil
  7. big ol'
  8. big old
  9. big ole
  10. big one
  11. big ones

Source and license

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