"big sleep" meaning in English

See big sleep in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Etymology: Apparently coined by novelist Raymond Chandler, author of The Big Sleep (1939). Etymology templates: {{coin|en|Raymond Chandler|nobycat=1|notext=1}} Raymond Chandler Head templates: {{en-noun|?}} big sleep
  1. (idiomatic, euphemistic, almost always preceded by the) Death. Wikipedia link: The Big Sleep Tags: euphemistic, idiomatic Categories (topical): Death Translations (type of sleep used as euphemism for death): ikiuni (Finnish)

Download JSON data for big sleep meaning in English (2.2kB)

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          "ref": "1939, Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, Penguin, published 2011, page 250",
          "text": "What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that.",
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          "ref": "1967, “When the Music’s Over”, in Strange Days, performed by The Doors",
          "text": "Before I sink into the big sleep / I want to hear / The scream of the butterfly",
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          "word": "ikiuni"
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      "sense": "type of sleep used as euphemism for death",
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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.