Word.ws English Dictionary

big stick

big stick noun: significant power to punish or coerce.

Noun

big stick (plural big sticks)

  1. (attributive, often) Significant power to punish or coerce.
    • Wilson publicly rejected both the "big stick diplomacy" of Teddy Roosevelt and the "dollar diplomacy" of William Howard Taft; […]1997, Randall Hansis, The Latin Americans: Understanding Their Legacy, page 188
    • Too much debate theory is based on power rather than reason. Kritiks are used as big sticks to avoid one of the duties closely associated with debating — research.2002, Kenneth T. Broda-Bahm, Perspectives in Controversy, page 300

Forms of big stick

pluralbig sticks

Questions about big stick

What does big stick mean?
Big stick means significant power to punish or coerce.
What part of speech is big stick?
Big stick is a noun.
What is the plural of big stick?
The plural of big stick is big sticks.

Words near big stick in the dictionary

  1. big spenders
  2. big spoon
  3. big spoons
  4. Big Spring
  5. Big Springs
  6. big stick
  7. big sticks
  8. Big Stone
  9. Big Stone County
  10. BIG suit
  11. BIG suits

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: big stick (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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