Word.ws English Dictionary

bite the big one

bite the big one verb: to die.

Verb

bite the big one (third-person singular simple present bites the big one, present participle biting the big one, simple past bit the big one, past participle bitten the big one)

  1. (slang) To die.
    • Fly, be free! Well, I guess we'll have to have a quick burial at sea then. I'll notify your next of kin. Your brother bit the big one.1978 September 14, Dale McRaven, Mork & Mindy, season 1, episode 2, spoken by Mork (Robin Williams)
    • "I thought all of dad's relatives bit the big one a long time ago."1983, Susan Arnout, The Frozen Lady, page 397
  2. (slang) To break down; to be impossible to repair or not worth repairing.
    • Whatever air-conditioning system the car had once possessed had bitten the big one years ago; ...1988, Barbara Hambly, The silicon mage, page 5
  3. (idiomatic) To perform poorly; to fail.
    • Empire of the Sun was an enormous literary and commercial success in Britain but pretty much bit the Big One on its own in the United States.1990, Norman Spinrad, Science fiction in the real world, page 183
  4. (slang) To be unpleasant or undesirable.
    • To Verdi, it bit the big one, but that was the way it worked.1996, Stephen Kimball, Death duty, page 9
  5. (slang) To perform fellatio.

Synonyms of bite the big one

30 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Forms of bite the big one

third-person singular presentbites the big one
present participlebiting the big one
pastbit the big one
past participlebitten the big one

Questions about bite the big one

What does bite the big one mean?
Bite the big one means to die.
What part of speech is bite the big one?
Bite the big one is a verb.
What is the past tense of bite the big one?
The past tense of bite the big one is bit the big one.

Words near bite the big one in the dictionary

  1. bite someone's style
  2. bite stick
  3. bite sticks
  4. bite suit
  5. bite suits
  6. bite the big one
  7. bite the biscuit
  8. bite the bullet
  9. bite the curb
  10. bite the dust
  11. bite the hand that feeds one

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bite the big one (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-bite the big one.ogg.

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