Word.ws English Dictionary

TBTF

TBTF is the initialism of too big to fail.

Meaning of too big to fail

Adjective

too big to fail

  1. Deemed too important to the economy or polity to be allowed to “fail”, that is to be liquidated or to go bankrupt.
    • The fact, which surely everybody knows and hardly anybody ventures to state, is that the stability of our great banks--and all our banking system which now matters a tittle consists of great banks--is based not on the supply of gold in their vaults, nor on the reserve in the Bank of England, but on...1912, Fabian Society, Fabian Tract No. 164, "Gold and State Banking: A Study in the Economics of Monopoly"
    Synonyms:
    TBTF

Questions about TBTF

What is TBTF the initialism of?
TBTF is the initialism of too big to fail.

Words near TBTF in the dictionary

  1. TBSA
  2. tbsp
  3. Tbsp.
  4. tbsps
  5. TBT
  6. TBTF
  7. tbth
  8. TBTs
  9. TBTWP
  10. TBU
  11. tbulge

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: TBTF (page history and authors); too big to fail (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: “TBTF.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tbtf. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.