Biggie

How to spell biggie

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce biggie

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does biggie mean?

1. nounSomething regarded as big, important, or a serious problem, used informally.

Biggie in a sentence

• Missing the morning train was no biggie because she worked from home that day.

• The merger was the biggie that everyone in the office had been waiting to hear about.

Where does biggie come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a modern, informal English coinage built from the everyday adjective 'big' plus the familiar diminutive and slangy suffix '-ie', the same playful ending found in words like 'sweetie' and 'oldie'. The base 'big' itself is of uncertain origin, recorded in northern English from around the 1300s with the sense of strong, powerful, or great in size, and its earlier roots are not clearly traced; for that reason the deeper history is genuinely murky. 'Biggie' emerged in twentieth century American colloquial speech, originally meaning a big or important thing, and it spread widely through the casual phrase 'no biggie', meaning that something is not a problem. The doubled g in the spelling is the key trap: it mirrors how English doubles a final consonant after a short stressed vowel before adding a suffix, just as 'big' becomes 'bigger'. Without that second g the word would suggest a long vowel, so the doubling is what keeps the short 'i' that we actually say.

How the word is built

• big (large, important)
• -gie (informal noun-forming suffix, doubling the g to keep the short 'i' sound)