Word.ws English Dictionary

big pharma

big pharma noun: large, prosperous pharmaceutical firms collectively, understood as a business group having significant economic, political, or social influence.

Noun (1)

big pharma (uncountable)

  1. (derogatory) Large, prosperous pharmaceutical firms collectively, understood as a business group having significant economic, political, or social influence.
    • "Biotech's only got about $1.5 billion in partnering funds today, but big pharma is spending $25 billion in R&D" each year with marginal results, notes Burrill.1994 September 26, “Biotech”, in BusinessWeek, retrieved 10 Oct 2013
    • Critics were indignant that a potentially dangerous drug was being used on a hunch, and suspected the influence of big pharma and its drive to expand its markets.2006 June 19, Daniel Williams, “Drugs Before Diagnosis?”, in Time

Noun (2) capitalized: Big Pharma

Big Pharma (uncountable)

  1. (alternative) Alternative form of big pharma.

Forms of big pharma

alternative formBig Pharma

Questions about big pharma

What does big pharma mean?
Big pharma means large, prosperous pharmaceutical firms collectively, understood as a business group having significant economic, political, or social influence.
What part of speech is big pharma?
Big pharma is a noun.

Words near big pharma in the dictionary

  1. big ones
  2. big Os
  3. Big Osage
  4. Big Pats Creek
  5. Big Peach
  6. big pharma
  7. big phat
  8. big picture
  9. big pictures
  10. Big Pine
  11. big pocket

Source and license

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