Word.ws English Dictionary

special sauce

special sauce noun: a basic ingredient in McDonald's Big Mac hamburgers, a sort of Thousand Island dressing (now called Big Mac sauce by the company).

Noun

special sauce (usually uncountable, plural special sauces)

  1. (usually) A basic ingredient in McDonald's Big Mac hamburgers, a sort of Thousand Island dressing (now called Big Mac sauce by the company).
    • two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun1975, McDonald's Corporation, Big Mac advertising jingle
    • one day you'll be eatin' a fast-food burger.... Ever wonder what makes special sauce so special?2001 January, Matt Groening, “Parasites Lost”, in Futurama, season 3, episode 4
  2. (usually) Burger sauce.
  3. (figuratively, usually) Synonym of secret sauce.
    Synonyms:
    secret sauce

Synonyms of special sauce

Forms of special sauce

pluralspecial sauces

Questions about special sauce

What does special sauce mean?
Special sauce means a basic ingredient in McDonald's Big Mac hamburgers, a sort of Thousand Island dressing (now called Big Mac sauce by the company).
What part of speech is special sauce?
Special sauce is a noun.
What is the plural of special sauce?
The plural of special sauce is special sauces.

Words near special sauce in the dictionary

  1. special retainers
  2. special revelation
  3. special rights
  4. special saloon
  5. special saloons
  6. special sauce
  7. special sauces
  8. special school
  9. special schools
  10. special service request
  11. special service requests

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: special sauce (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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Cite this entry: “special sauce.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/special_sauce. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.