what's the big idea in English

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  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "phrase",
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    {
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          "name": "American English",
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      "examples": [
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          "text": "I heard you been chatting up my girl. What's the big idea?",
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          "text": "Hey, what's the big idea, you telling everybody I'd left town?",
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      ],
      "glosses": [
        "Used to express surprise or dissatisfaction with an action or statement of another person, especially to that person."
      ],
      "id": "en-what's_the_big_idea-en-phrase-CP9Q2pmO",
      "qualifier": "often preceded by hey",
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(US, colloquial, often preceded by hey) Used to express surprise or dissatisfaction with an action or statement of another person, especially to that person."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "US",
        "colloquial"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "what's the big idea"
}

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{
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "phrase"
      },
      "expansion": "what's the big idea",
      "name": "head"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "phrase",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "American English",
        "English colloquialisms",
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English phrases",
        "English terms with usage examples",
        "Pages with 1 entry",
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          ],
          "text": "Hey, what's the big idea, you telling everybody I'd left town?",
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        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "Used to express surprise or dissatisfaction with an action or statement of another person, especially to that person."
      ],
      "qualifier": "often preceded by hey",
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        "(US, colloquial, often preceded by hey) Used to express surprise or dissatisfaction with an action or statement of another person, especially to that person."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "US",
        "colloquial"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "what's the big idea"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-05-27 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-05-20 using wiktextract (a4e883e and f1c2b61). 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.

"what's the big idea" meaning in English

Phrase