"big bad" meaning in English

See big bad in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: big bads [plural]
Etymology: First coined in 1998 in the episode Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, season two of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Head templates: {{en-noun}} big bad (plural big bads)
  1. A major adversary or antagonist of a piece of fiction. Categories (topical): Fiction

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for big bad meaning in English (2.0kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "First coined in 1998 in the episode Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, season two of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "big bads",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
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  "head_templates": [
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      "args": {},
      "expansion": "big bad (plural big bads)",
      "name": "en-noun"
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  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English alliterative compounds",
          "parents": [
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            "Alliterative phrases",
            "Compound terms",
            "Phrases",
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            "Lemmas",
            "Multiword terms"
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          "source": "w"
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          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "topical",
          "langcode": "en",
          "name": "Fiction",
          "orig": "en:Fiction",
          "parents": [
            "Artistic works",
            "Art",
            "Culture",
            "Society",
            "All topics",
            "Fundamental"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2017 September 19, Gwilym Mumford, “Kingsman: The Golden Circle review – spy sequel reaches new heights of skyscraping silliness”, in the Guardian",
          "text": "Charlie, now menacingly equipped with a bionic arm, is these days in the service of new pantomime big bad, Poppy Adams, played with lysergic glee by Julianne Moore.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A major adversary or antagonist of a piece of fiction."
      ],
      "id": "en-big_bad-en-noun-YQ1dETuV",
      "links": [
        [
          "adversary",
          "adversary"
        ],
        [
          "antagonist",
          "antagonist"
        ]
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "big bad"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "First coined in 1998 in the episode Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, season two of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "big bads",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "big bad (plural big bads)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English alliterative compounds",
        "English countable nouns",
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English entries with language name categories using raw markup",
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        "English multiword terms",
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        "English terms with quotations",
        "en:Fiction"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2017 September 19, Gwilym Mumford, “Kingsman: The Golden Circle review – spy sequel reaches new heights of skyscraping silliness”, in the Guardian",
          "text": "Charlie, now menacingly equipped with a bionic arm, is these days in the service of new pantomime big bad, Poppy Adams, played with lysergic glee by Julianne Moore.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A major adversary or antagonist of a piece of fiction."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "adversary",
          "adversary"
        ],
        [
          "antagonist",
          "antagonist"
        ]
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "big bad"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-05 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). 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.