"mother of all" meaning in All languages combined

See mother of all on Wiktionary

Phrase [English]

Forms: mother of all — [canonical]
Etymology: 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). Etymology templates: {{calque|en|ar|أُمّ||mother (of)}} Calque of Arabic أُمّ (ʔumm, “mother (of)”), {{m|ar|أُمّ المَعَارِك||mother of (all) battles}} أُمّ المَعَارِك (ʔumm al-maʕārik, “mother of (all) battles”), {{m|en|mother}} mother Head templates: {{head|en|phrase|head=mother of all —}} mother of all —
  1. (colloquial) 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). Wikipedia link: Saddam Hussein Tags: colloquial Synonyms: father, granddaddy, grandmammy Derived forms: Mother of all Bombs, Mother of all Budgets Related terms: mother

Download JSON data for mother of all meaning in All languages combined (3.1kB)

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          "ref": "2003 December 26, “2003 Movie Guide”, in Christian Science Monitor",
          "text": "Driving to a dinner engagement, a Parisian woman gets stuck in the mother of all traffic jams, offers a ride to a handsome pedestrian, and enters a fleeting affair that catches both of them by surprise.",
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        "(colloquial) 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)."
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}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-09 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (4d5d0bb and edd475d). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.