Word.ws English Dictionary

big smoke

big smoke noun: any large city.

Noun

the big smoke (uncountable)

  1. (Australia) Any large city.
    • I got a transfer in my bank job and on the first day on the job in the big smoke I had to share a teller's box with a young lady called Kim, a real spunk and my future wife.1995, Paul Vautin, Turn It Up!, Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, page 82

Proper noun capitalized: Big Smoke

the Big Smoke

  1. (UK, informal) London.
    • The first man I spoke to was Whitechapel to the backbone, plainly to be spotted as such as if it had been tattooed on his forehead. Making myself at home with him, I desired to know what brought him so far from the "big smoke," and on board a whaler of all places in the world.1898, Frank Thomas Bullen, The Cruise of the Cachalot
    Synonyms:
    the Smoke
  2. (Ireland, informal) Dublin.
    Synonyms:
    the Big Shmoke
  3. (Canada, informal) Toronto.
  4. (broadly) Any large city.

Synonyms of big smoke

  • the Smoke
  • the Big Shmoke

Questions about big smoke

What does big smoke mean?
Big smoke means any large city.
What part of speech is big smoke?
Big smoke can be a noun or a proper noun.

Words near big smoke in the dictionary

  1. big six
  2. big sixes
  3. Big Sky Country
  4. big sleep
  5. big slick
  6. big smoke
  7. big society
  8. big spender
  9. big spenders
  10. big spoon
  11. big spoons

Source and license

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