"bigger than Ben Hur" meaning in English

See bigger than Ben Hur in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Phrase

Audio: En-au-bigger than Ben Hur.ogg [Australia] Forms: bigger than Ben-Hur [canonical]
Etymology: A comparison to the extravagance of the 1899 play Ben-Hur. Though the phrase is often erroneously claimed to have been coined in reference to the 1959 film, use of the phrase long predates the film. Head templates: {{head|en|phrase|head=bigger than Ben-Hur}} bigger than Ben-Hur
  1. (simile, informal, comical) huge, extravagant. Wikipedia link: Ben-Hur (play) Tags: informal

Download JSON data for bigger than Ben Hur meaning in English (2.0kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "A comparison to the extravagance of the 1899 play Ben-Hur. Though the phrase is often erroneously claimed to have been coined in reference to the 1959 film, use of the phrase long predates the film.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "bigger than Ben-Hur",
      "tags": [
        "canonical"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "phrase",
        "head": "bigger than Ben-Hur"
      },
      "expansion": "bigger than Ben-Hur",
      "name": "head"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "phrase",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
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          "kind": "other",
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          "source": "w"
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        {
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          "name": "English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys",
          "parents": [
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      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1916, Columbia Theatre advertisement in The Argonaut, Volume 79, No. 2071, page 379",
          "text": "150 People, Arabs, Camels, Horses, Donkeys and Goats\nThe Eighth Wonder of the World\nBIGGER THAN “BEN-HUR”",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "huge, extravagant."
      ],
      "id": "en-bigger_than_Ben_Hur-en-phrase-M88-Xp6R",
      "links": [
        [
          "huge",
          "huge"
        ],
        [
          "extravagant",
          "extravagant"
        ]
      ],
      "qualifier": "simile",
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(simile, informal, comical) huge, extravagant."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "informal"
      ],
      "wikipedia": [
        "Ben-Hur (play)"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "audio": "En-au-bigger than Ben Hur.ogg",
      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/2/20/En-au-bigger_than_Ben_Hur.ogg/En-au-bigger_than_Ben_Hur.ogg.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/En-au-bigger_than_Ben_Hur.ogg",
      "tags": [
        "Australia"
      ],
      "text": "Audio (AU)"
    }
  ],
  "word": "bigger than Ben Hur"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "A comparison to the extravagance of the 1899 play Ben-Hur. Though the phrase is often erroneously claimed to have been coined in reference to the 1959 film, use of the phrase long predates the film.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "bigger than Ben-Hur",
      "tags": [
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      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "phrase",
        "head": "bigger than Ben-Hur"
      },
      "expansion": "bigger than Ben-Hur",
      "name": "head"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "phrase",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English entries with language name categories using raw markup",
        "English eponyms",
        "English informal terms",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English phrases",
        "English similes",
        "English terms with audio links",
        "English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys",
        "English terms with quotations"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1916, Columbia Theatre advertisement in The Argonaut, Volume 79, No. 2071, page 379",
          "text": "150 People, Arabs, Camels, Horses, Donkeys and Goats\nThe Eighth Wonder of the World\nBIGGER THAN “BEN-HUR”",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "huge, extravagant."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "huge",
          "huge"
        ],
        [
          "extravagant",
          "extravagant"
        ]
      ],
      "qualifier": "simile",
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(simile, informal, comical) huge, extravagant."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "informal"
      ],
      "wikipedia": [
        "Ben-Hur (play)"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "audio": "En-au-bigger than Ben Hur.ogg",
      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/2/20/En-au-bigger_than_Ben_Hur.ogg/En-au-bigger_than_Ben_Hur.ogg.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/En-au-bigger_than_Ben_Hur.ogg",
      "tags": [
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      ],
      "text": "Audio (AU)"
    }
  ],
  "word": "bigger than Ben Hur"
}

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.