Word.ws English Dictionary

Frightful Five

Frightful Five proper noun: the five largest technology companies in the world: Amazon, Apple, Alphabet (owner of Google), Facebook (or its parent company Meta) and Microsoft.

Proper noun

the Frightful Five

  1. (informal) The five largest technology companies in the world: Amazon, Apple, Alphabet (owner of Google), Facebook (or its parent company Meta) and Microsoft.
    • The companies I call the Frightful Five — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s parent company — have experienced astounding growth over the last few years, making them the world’s five most valuable public companies.2017 October 11, Frahad Manjoo, “The Frightful Five Want to Rule Entertainment. They Are Hitting Limits.”, in The New York Times
    • Both factors freeze out other entrants, limit the number of insiders to one or two, and reduce many outsiders to irrelevance, if they survive at all. Lest anyone doubt the importance of rapid scaling and network effects, the Frightful Five benefit(ed) from these factors.2017 September/October, Shane Greenstein, “Insider Privileges”, in IEEE Micro, volume 37, number 5

Questions about Frightful Five

What does Frightful Five mean?
Frightful Five means the five largest technology companies in the world: Amazon, Apple, Alphabet (owner of Google), Facebook (or its parent company Meta) and Microsoft.
What part of speech is Frightful Five?
Frightful Five is a proper noun.

Words near Frightful Five in the dictionary

  1. frightens
  2. frightensome
  3. frightfest
  4. frightfests
  5. frightful
  6. Frightful Five
  7. frightfull
  8. frightfuller
  9. frightfully
  10. frightfulness
  11. frightfulnesses

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Frightful Five (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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