big league
51
3.0
- noun
- /bɪɡ liɡ/
:
las Grandes Ligas
- Over a dozen big league teams have left one market for another since the early 1980s.
- a big-league team
- big-league baseball
Like your odds of getting into the big leagues that's true would be higher.
- Like your odds of getting into the big leagues that's true would be higher.
- Yeah, it made it up to the big leagues.
- And so AA is the BDRS, AAA is the SD s s and then the bigs is like the big leagues, right?
- There are far more that fail on the way over the big leagues.
- The next day, oh, I got, you know, I did well, here come the big leagues and you're just on this roller coaster.
- So through that, through the glossy mags and her, that's when we started to hit the big league.
Examples
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This isn't the big leagues.
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Playing in the big leagues is a goal for every young athlete.
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This is one step under the big league.
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We just want to be in the big leagues.
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Welcome to the big leagues.
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This is a chance to manage in the big leagues.
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Everyone knew he would make it to the big leagues someday.
Fiction book (1992) -
She's in the big leagues now.
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During the next several years, the number of Latinos in the big leagues slowly increased.
Academic text (1994) -
Fernando Valenzuela, by far, was the most heralded Latin player to play in the big leagues.
Academic text (1994)
Synonyms
81
3.4
The highest level of professional sport where the best players play
8
4.3
The top professional baseball leagues in the United States
Antonyms
How Elite
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'highest level of competition' is directly derivable from combining 'big' (important/large) with 'league' (a sports competition), so the overall sense follows straightforward compositional logic. This pattern is common in English (and reflected in other languages' equivalents, e.g. 'las grandes ligas'), so a B1 learner who knows both words would almost certainly infer the MWE's meaning.
Etymology
Big league may come from baseball, where a big league was the top group of teams, above the 'minor leagues'. So today big league means being at the 'top level' of sport or a job.