Word.ws English Dictionary

bigger than Ben Hur

bigger than Ben Hur phrase: huge, extravagant.

Phrase

bigger than Ben Hur

  1. (informal, simile) huge, extravagant.
    • 150 People, Arabs, Camels, Horses, Donkeys and Goats
      The Eighth Wonder of the World
      BIGGER THAN “BEN-HUR”1916, Columbia Theatre advertisement in The Argonaut, Volume 79, No. 2071, page 379

Origin of bigger than Ben Hur

A comparison to the extravagance of the 1899 play Ben-Hur. Though the phrase is often erroneously claimed to have been coined in reference to the 1959 film, use of the phrase long predates the film.

Questions about bigger than Ben Hur

What does bigger than Ben Hur mean?
Bigger than Ben Hur means huge, extravagant.
What part of speech is bigger than Ben Hur?
Bigger than Ben Hur is a phrase.

Words near bigger than Ben Hur in the dictionary

  1. bigger
  2. bigger fish in the sea
  3. bigger fish to fry
  4. bigger picture
  5. bigger pictures
  6. bigger than Ben Hur
  7. bigger than life
  8. bigger than shit
  9. bigger-eyed
  10. bigger-hearted
  11. bigger-sized

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bigger than Ben Hur (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-bigger than Ben Hur.ogg.

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