"big gun" meaning in English

See big gun in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Audio: en-au-big gun.ogg [Australia] Forms: big guns [plural]
Head templates: {{en-noun}} big gun (plural big guns)
  1. (military) A large artillery gun or one of the largest-caliber naval guns (as on a battleship). Categories (topical): Military, Artillery Synonyms: great gun
    Sense id: en-big_gun-en-noun-~TDQNB3A Disambiguation of Artillery: 66 34 Topics: government, military, politics, war
  2. (idiomatic, by extension, chiefly in the plural) A person, group, thing, or course of action that is powerful, influential, or particularly effective. Tags: broadly, idiomatic, in-plural Synonyms: big shot, bigwig, important person
    Sense id: en-big_gun-en-noun-Jaq-kIsf Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English entries with topic categories using raw markup, English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 23 77 Disambiguation of English entries with topic categories using raw markup: 14 86 Disambiguation of English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys: 20 80

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for big gun meaning in English (4.4kB)

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        {
          "ref": "1870 December 2, “The Suez Mail”, in Southland Times, number 1342, New Zealand, page 2",
          "text": "London, Nov. 1: The big guns opened fire on Paris today at mid-day.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1968 March 26, “Battleship begins Viet Tests”, in Evening News, Newburgh, NY, USA, retrieved 2011-08-19, page 1",
          "text": "The smaller crew was possible because the battleship was stripped of all but her big guns.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2008 December 6, William J. Bennett, John Cribb, “Deadly resolve answered attack”, in Daily Courier, USA, retrieved 2011-08-19",
          "text": "The USS West Virginia became one of many symbols of American resolve. . . . Her big guns pounded the enemy at the battles of Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A large artillery gun or one of the largest-caliber naval guns (as on a battleship)."
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        "(military) A large artillery gun or one of the largest-caliber naval guns (as on a battleship)."
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          "ref": "1888 June 6, “A Great Day for Big Guns”, in New York Times, retrieved 2011-08-20",
          "text": "This has been a great day for the big guns. This does not refer to Prof. Lummis and the other big guns of the Board of Visitors, for every day is a great one for them.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1957 Aug. 28, Ed Wilks, \"Sports\" (Headline), Park City News (USA), p. 15 (retrieved 20 Aug. 2011)",
          "text": "Berra Is Big Gun In Yankee Victory"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2001 June 29, Frank Pellegrini, “Whatever Happened to Military Restructuring?”, in Time",
          "text": "And the administration's big guns — Bush, Cheney, Powell and once-and-current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — had the clout to make bold and necessary changes.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2007 March 26, Yuri Wuensch, “Eric Clapton simply masterful”, in canoe.ca, Canada, retrieved 2011-08-20",
          "text": "Clapton kept the big guns for last, finishing the set off with Derek and the Domino's \"Layla\", complete with the haunting instrumentals at song's end.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A person, group, thing, or course of action that is powerful, influential, or particularly effective."
      ],
      "id": "en-big_gun-en-noun-Jaq-kIsf",
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        "(idiomatic, by extension, chiefly in the plural) A person, group, thing, or course of action that is powerful, influential, or particularly effective."
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        },
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          "word": "important person"
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          "ref": "1968 March 26, “Battleship begins Viet Tests”, in Evening News, Newburgh, NY, USA, retrieved 2011-08-19, page 1",
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        "(military) A large artillery gun or one of the largest-caliber naval guns (as on a battleship)."
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          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1957 Aug. 28, Ed Wilks, \"Sports\" (Headline), Park City News (USA), p. 15 (retrieved 20 Aug. 2011)",
          "text": "Berra Is Big Gun In Yankee Victory"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2001 June 29, Frank Pellegrini, “Whatever Happened to Military Restructuring?”, in Time",
          "text": "And the administration's big guns — Bush, Cheney, Powell and once-and-current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — had the clout to make bold and necessary changes.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2007 March 26, Yuri Wuensch, “Eric Clapton simply masterful”, in canoe.ca, Canada, retrieved 2011-08-20",
          "text": "Clapton kept the big guns for last, finishing the set off with Derek and the Domino's \"Layla\", complete with the haunting instrumentals at song's end.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
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        "(idiomatic, by extension, chiefly in the plural) A person, group, thing, or course of action that is powerful, influential, or particularly effective."
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          "word": "big shot"
        },
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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.