Word.ws English Dictionary

mother of all

mother of all phrase: used before a plural noun to form a compound noun having the sense of: the greatest or largest of (its kind); the most epic example of (its kind).

Phrase

mother of all

  1. (colloquial, idiomatic) Used before a plural noun to form a compound noun having the sense of: the greatest or largest of (its kind); the most epic example of (its kind).
    • , etc.
    • Near-synonym: Big One

Examples of mother of all in a sentence

  • Welcome to the mother of all taste tests.2006, Jean Chatzky, “Get the Scoop”, in Money, vol. 35.8:
  • “[Donald Trump's tariff proposal] is a prescription for the mother of all stagflations,” Larry Summers, Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, told Bloomberg TV back in June.2024 October 30, Laurent Belsie, “Surprisingly, Wall Street doesn’t seem to care who gets elected. So far, at least.”, in The Christian...

Synonyms of mother of all

Origin of mother of all

Calque of Arabic أُمّ (ʔumm, “mother (of)”). Popularized and given its current sense by Saddam Hussein's claim that the impending Gulf War would be the أُمّ المَعَارِك (ʔumm al-maʕārik, “mother of (all) battles”), though mother had long been used in somewhat similar senses in English, and other familial terms are used with the same meaning, like granddaddy (of all traffic jams) and father (of all battles).

Words formed from mother of all

Questions about mother of all

What does mother of all mean?
Mother of all means used before a plural noun to form a compound noun having the sense of: the greatest or largest of (its kind); the most epic example of (its kind).
How do you use mother of all in a sentence?
Welcome to the mother of all taste tests.
What part of speech is mother of all?
Mother of all is a phrase.

Words near mother of all in the dictionary

  1. mother lodes
  2. mother may I
  3. Mother Monster
  4. mother naked
  5. mother nature
  6. mother of all
  7. Mother of all Bombs
  8. Mother of all Budgets
  9. mother of chapel
  10. mother of coal
  11. Mother of God

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mother of all (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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