Word.ws English Dictionary

get big or get out

get big or get out phrase: an exhortation and admonition to family farms as businesses, or to other businesses in other industries, that they need to either expand their operations and capitalization or be outcompeted (by those who do so) and thus go out of business.

Phrase

get big or get out

  1. An exhortation and admonition to family farms as businesses, or to other businesses in other industries, that they need to either expand their operations and capitalization or be outcompeted (by those who do so) and thus go out of business.

Origin of get big or get out

Popularized by (and perhaps coined by) Earl Butz, a U.S. secretary of agriculture in the 1970s.

Questions about get big or get out

What does get big or get out mean?
Get big or get out means an exhortation and admonition to family farms as businesses, or to other businesses in other industries, that they need to either expand their operations and capitalization or be outcompeted (by those who do so) and thus go out of business.
What part of speech is get big or get out?
Get big or get out is a phrase.

Words near get big or get out in the dictionary

  1. get behind
  2. get bent
  3. get bent out of shape
  4. get better
  5. get between
  6. get big or get out
  7. get blood from a stone
  8. get blood from a turnip
  9. get blood out of a stone
  10. get blood out of a turnip
  11. get busy

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: get big or get out (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “get big or get out.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/get_big_or_get_out. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.