Word.ws English Dictionary

big shop

big shop noun: used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see big, shop.

Noun

big shop (plural big shops)

  1. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see big, shop.
  2. (Australia, UK, idiomatic) A large, regular purchase of groceries; as opposed to ad hoc or impulse purchases.
    • I do a monthly big shop and get bits in between. I think I would be better off planning meals for the week and going weekly.2007 July 23, Angela, “Food shopping: Weekly or Monthly?”, in Netmums, retrieved 17 Nov 2016
    • These changes, experienced by all the "Big Four" supermarkets, suggest that the era of the once-a-week big shop is nearing an end.2014 October 5, Katie Hope, “The death of the weekly supermarket shop”, in BBC News

Examples of big shop in a sentence

  • A lot of consumers are moving away from one big shop a week to ‘basket shopping’.2016 May 4, Emma Reynolds, quoting Brian Walker, “Woolies’ woes promise cheaper prices for customers”, in new.com.au:
  • If they are trying to get people to enjoy their time there, whether going out for a meal, to the cinema or for a big shop, they don’t want to be keeping an eye on the clock.2016 October 27, Aaron Sims, quoting Rosalind Eastland, “Shoppers speak out against car park fines in Yate”, in Gloucestershire Gazette:
  • So try and do a big shop rather than lots of little ones.2016 November 8, “Amazon launches Certified Refurbished store selling cheaper electronics”, in BT.com, archived from the original on 12 Nov...

Forms of big shop

pluralbig shops

Questions about big shop

What does big shop mean?
Big shop means used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see big, shop.
How do you use big shop in a sentence?
A lot of consumers are moving away from one big shop a week to ‘basket shopping’.
What part of speech is big shop?
Big shop is a noun.
What is the plural of big shop?
The plural of big shop is big shops.

Words near big shop in the dictionary

  1. big schools
  2. big science
  3. big screen
  4. big screens
  5. Big Shanty
  6. big shop
  7. big shops
  8. big shot
  9. big shots
  10. big show
  11. big shows

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: big shop (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: EN-AU ck1 big shop.ogg.

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