Big Five
Americannoun
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the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan during World War I and at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.
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(after World War II) the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and France.
noun
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the five countries considered to be the major world powers. In the period immediately following World War II, the US, Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and France were regarded as the Big Five
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the lion, the elephant, the rhinoceros, the buffalo, and the leopard: considered to be the five principal African wild animals, esp as sought by those on safari
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Also: Big Four. Big Three. a small powerful group, as of banks, companies, etc
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
The company also claims it's in talks with several of the "Big Five" US publishers: Hachette, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, and Macmillan.
From Barron's ● Jul. 27, 2026
From its desultory beginnings, Random House has grown into a behemoth, one of the industry’s Big Five.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 30, 2026
The crime intelligence boss claimed the Big Five led a network with widespread influence across the country.
From BBC ● Dec. 23, 2025
“It’s a very different structure from the Big Five publishers. You don’t get an advance or anything. You just get the royalties.”
From Slate ● Nov. 3, 2025
We give them a questionnaire, like the Big Five Inventory, carefully designed to elicit telling responses.
From "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
