big sleep
big sleep noun: death.
Noun
big sleep
- Death.
- What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that.1939, Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, Penguin, published 2011, page 250
- Before I sink into the big sleep / I want to hear / The scream of the butterfly1967, “When the Music’s Over”, in Strange Days, performed by The Doors
- Synonyms:
- dirt nap, sleep of the just, death, end, tomb, celestial transfer, decease, decomposition, defunction, dematerialization
Synonyms of big sleep
- dirt nap
- sleep of the just
- death
- end
- tomb
- celestial transfer
- decease
- decomposition
- dematerialization
- demise
17 more synonymsFewer synonyms
- doom
- exit
- expiration
- fatality
- liquidation
- mortality
- passing
- quietus
- repose
- sunset
- the big sleep
- crash
- downfall
- fall
- (the) bane
- (the) end
- defunction
Origin of big sleep
Apparently coined by novelist Raymond Chandler, author of The Big Sleep (1939).
Questions about big sleep
- What does big sleep mean?
- Big sleep means death.
- What part of speech is big sleep?
- Big sleep is a noun.
Words near big sleep in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: big sleep (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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-big sleep.wav.
Cite this entry: “big sleep.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/big_sleep. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.