Word.ws English Dictionary

big year

big year noun: an informal competition among birdwatchers to determine who can see or hear the largest number of species of birds within a single calendar year and within a specific geographical area.

Noun

big year (plural big years)

  1. An informal competition among birdwatchers to determine who can see or hear the largest number of species of birds within a single calendar year and within a specific geographical area.
    • And so the record stood. Nobody seemed to be much concerned with it, unlike in Britain or the States where Big Years are hotly contested amongst twitchers.2005, Sean Dooley, The Big Twitch, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, page 21
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see big, year.

Forms of big year

pluralbig years

Questions about big year

What does big year mean?
Big year means an informal competition among birdwatchers to determine who can see or hear the largest number of species of birds within a single calendar year and within a specific geographical area.
What part of speech is big year?
Big year is a noun.
What is the plural of big year?
The plural of big year is big years.

Words near big year in the dictionary

  1. big woop
  2. big word
  3. big words
  4. big wow
  5. Big Yahu
  6. big year
  7. big years
  8. big yikes
  9. big yus
  10. big, fat, hairy deal
  11. big, fat, hairy deals

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: big year (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 year.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/big_year. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.