Word.ws English Dictionary

bitten the big one

bitten the big one is the past participle 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 bitten the big one

What is bitten the big one the past participle of?
Bitten the big one is the past participle of bite the big one.

Words near bitten the big one in the dictionary

  1. bitten one's nails
  2. bitten one's thumb
  3. bitten one's tongue
  4. bitten someone's hand off
  5. bitten someone's head off
  6. bitten the big one
  7. bitten the biscuit
  8. bitten the bullet
  9. bitten the curb
  10. bitten the dust
  11. bitten the hand that fed one

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bitten 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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