What's the difference between big and great?

Big


Definition:

  • (superl.) Having largeness of size; of much bulk or magnitude; of great size; large.
  • (superl.) Great with young; pregnant; swelling; ready to give birth or produce; -- often figuratively.
  • (superl.) Having greatness, fullness, importance, inflation, distention, etc., whether in a good or a bad sense; as, a big heart; a big voice; big looks; to look big. As applied to looks, it indicates haughtiness or pride.
  • (n.) Alt. of Bigg
  • (v. t.) Alt. of Bigg

Example Sentences:

  • (1) That's why the big dreams have come from the smaller candidates such as the radical left's Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
  • (2) A dedicated goal makes a big difference in mobilising action and resources.
  • (3) We could do with similar action to cut out botnets and spam, but there aren't any big-money lobbyists coming to Mandelson pleading loss of business through those.
  • (4) Peter Stott of the Met Office, who led the study, said: "With global warming we're talking about very big changes in the overall water cycle.
  • (5) When faced with a big dilemma, the time-honoured tradition of politicians is to order an inquiry, and that is what Browne expects.
  • (6) How big tobacco lost its final fight for hearts, lungs and minds Read more Shares in Imperial closed down 1% and British American Tobacco lost 0.75%, both underperforming the FTSE100’s 0.3% decline.
  • (7) "With the advent of sophisticated data-processing capabilities (including big data), the big number-crunchers can detect, model and counter all manner of online activities just by detecting the behavioural patterns they see in the data and adjusting their tactics accordingly.
  • (8) Evidence of the industrial panic surfaced at Digital Britain when Sly Bailey, the chief executive of Trinity Mirror, suggested that national newspaper websites that chased big online audiences have "devalued news" , whatever that might mean.
  • (9) Living by the "Big River" as a child, Cash soaked up work songs, church music, and country & western from radio station WMPS in Memphis, or the broadcasts from Nashville's Grand Ole Opry on Friday and Saturday evenings.
  • (10) It could provoke the gravest risk, that all three rating agencies declare a credit event and then there are big contagion risks for other countries," he said.
  • (11) If Clegg's concerns do broadly accord with Cameron's, how will the PM sell such a big U-turn to his increasingly anti-Clegg backbenchers?
  • (12) Lady Gaga is not the first big music star to make a new album available early to mobile customers.
  • (13) Without that, and without undertaking big changes, the service's future may fall into doubt, he says.
  • (14) "They couldn't understand until I said 'No, because I'm a big shot now, because I am in Wild Wild West and I have, like, 10 covers coming out, and I want a bigger part.'
  • (15) For the past six years, a big focus of my work has been bringing the first schools to some of the remotest parts of northern Sierra Leone .
  • (16) The Treasury said: "Britain has been at the forefront of global reforms to make banking more responsible, including big reductions in upfront cash bonuses and linking rewards to long-term success.
  • (17) One of the big sticking points is cash – with rich countries so far failing to live up to promise to mobilise $100bn a year by 2020 for climate finance .
  • (18) Reverse-phase high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with radioimmunoassay revealed that the major component of ir-endothelin corresponds to standard endothelin-1 (1-21) and the major component of ir-big endothelin corresponds to standard big endothelin (porcine, 1-39).
  • (19) That clearly will have a big impact on the way people relate to each other and form bonds over the coming generations.
  • (20) It takes more than a statistical read out and the return of big bank bonuses for a real recovery," he said.

Great


Definition:

  • (superl.) Large in space; of much size; big; immense; enormous; expanded; -- opposed to small and little; as, a great house, ship, farm, plain, distance, length.
  • (superl.) Large in number; numerous; as, a great company, multitude, series, etc.
  • (superl.) Long continued; lengthened in duration; prolonged in time; as, a great while; a great interval.
  • (superl.) Superior; admirable; commanding; -- applied to thoughts, actions, and feelings.
  • (superl.) Endowed with extraordinary powers; uncommonly gifted; able to accomplish vast results; strong; powerful; mighty; noble; as, a great hero, scholar, genius, philosopher, etc.
  • (superl.) Holding a chief position; elevated: lofty: eminent; distingushed; foremost; principal; as, great men; the great seal; the great marshal, etc.
  • (superl.) Entitled to earnest consideration; weighty; important; as, a great argument, truth, or principle.
  • (superl.) Pregnant; big (with young).
  • (superl.) More than ordinary in degree; very considerable in degree; as, to use great caution; to be in great pain.
  • (superl.) Older, younger, or more remote, by single generation; -- often used before grand to indicate one degree more remote in the direct line of descent; as, great-grandfather (a grandfather's or a grandmother's father), great-grandson, etc.
  • (n.) The whole; the gross; as, a contract to build a ship by the great.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Arterial compliance of great vessels can be studied through the Doppler evaluation of pulsed wave velocity along the arterial tree.
  • (2) Both apertures were repaired with great caution using individual sutures without resection of the hernial sac.
  • (3) However, ticks, which failed to finish their feeding and represent a disproportionately great part of the whole parasite's population, die together with them and the parasitic system quickly restores its stability.
  • (4) To be fair to lads who find themselves just a bus ride from Auschwitz, a visit to the camp is now considered by many tourists to be a Holocaust "bucket list item", up there with the Anne Frank museum, where Justin Bieber recently delivered this compliment : "Anne was a great girl.
  • (5) Subtypes of HBs Ag are already of great use in the epidemiology of hepatitis B virus infections; yet they may have additional significance.
  • (6) Until the 1960's there was great confusion, both within and between countries, on the meaning of diagnostic terms such as emphysema, asthma, and chronic brochitis.
  • (7) For viewers in the US, you get the worst possible in-game managerial interview in Mike Matheny, one that's so bad, it's actually great!
  • (8) When compared with lissencephalic species, a great horizontal fibrillary system (which is vertically arranged in gyral regions) was observed in convoluted brains.
  • (9) DI James Faulkner of Great Manchester police said: “The men and women working in the factory have told us that they were subjected to physical and verbal assaults at the hands of their employers and forced to work more than 80-hours before ending up with around £25 for their week’s work.
  • (10) Nucleotide, which is essential for catalysis, greatly enhances the binding of IpOHA by the reductoisomerase, with NADPH (normally present during the enzyme's rearrangement step, i.e., conversion of a beta-keto acid into an alpha-keto acid, in either the forward or reverse physiological reactions) being more effective than NADP.
  • (11) Over the past decade the use of monoclonal antibodies has greatly advanced our knowledge of the biological properties and heterogeneity that exist within human tumours, and in particular in lung cancer.
  • (12) The following conclusions emerge: (i) when the 3' or the 3' penultimate base of the oligonucleotide mismatched an allele, no amplification product could be detected; (ii) when the mismatches were 3 and 4 bases from the 3' end of the primer, differential amplification was still observed, but only at certain concentrations of magnesium chloride; (iii) the mismatched allele can be detected in the presence of a 40-fold excess of the matched allele; (iv) primers as short as 13 nucleotides were effective; and (v) the specificity of the amplification could be overwhelmed by greatly increasing the concentration of target DNA.
  • (13) It’s great to observe the beach from that perspective.
  • (14) The dose response effect in this tumor is steep and combinations which compromise the dose of adriamycin too greatly are showing inferior results.
  • (15) Although the relative contributions of different fuels varies greatly in different organisms, in none is there a simple reliance on stored ATP.
  • (16) = 19) with a very low, but statistically significant, correlation with the AUC, r = 0.35 (p less than 0.05), thus demonstrating a very great individual variation in sensitivity to cimetidine.
  • (17) The popularly used procedure in Great Britain is that in which a sheet of Ivalon sponge is sutured to the sacrum and wrapped around the rectum thus anchoring it in place.
  • (18) Transfection of the treated DNA into SOS-induced spheroplasts results in an increase in mutagenesis as great as 50-fold.
  • (19) From the social economic point of view nosocomial infections represent a very important cost factor, which could be reduced to great deal by activities for prevention of nosocomial infection.
  • (20) We conclude that inflammatory lesions at these sites are not uncommon and that CT scans are diagnostic in the great majority.

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