Biggest

How to spell biggest

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce biggest

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does biggest mean?

1. adjectiveLargest in size, extent, or importance among those being compared.

Biggest in a sentence

• The biggest room in the house became the shared office.

• Winning that contract was the biggest moment of her career.

Where does biggest come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the superlative form of 'big', an adjective that appeared in late Middle English around the 1300s with the sense of 'strong' or 'powerful' before settling into its modern meaning of 'large in size'. The origin of 'big' itself is genuinely uncertain; it is not recorded in Old English and may have entered from a Scandinavian source related to dialect words meaning 'mighty' or 'wealthy', though no single ancestor is firmly proven. The comparative and superlative endings '-er' and '-est' are old native English suffixes inherited from Germanic, used to grade adjectives. Because 'big' ends in a short vowel followed by a single consonant, the spelling doubles that final g before adding '-est', which is the small trap worth remembering. Set against most English words it is plain and everyday, but the doubled g is the one detail writers occasionally second-guess.

How the word is built

• big (large)
• -est (superlative suffix, with the g doubled before the ending)