Word.ws English Dictionary

biting the big one

biting the big one is the present participle and gerund of bite the big one.

Meaning of bite the big one

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)
  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.

Questions about biting the big one

What is biting the big one the present participle and gerund of?
Biting the big one is the present participle and gerund of bite the big one.

Words near biting the big one in the dictionary

  1. biting point
  2. biting points
  3. biting someone's hand off
  4. biting someone's head off
  5. biting stonecrop
  6. biting the big one
  7. biting the biscuit
  8. biting the bullet
  9. biting the curb
  10. biting the dust
  11. biting the hand that feeds one

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: biting the big one (page history and authors); 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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