mother of all
14
7.8
- idiom
- Informal
- What about the mother of all messes?
- the mother of all battles
- the mother of all monsters
- the mother of all photo ops
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Watch on YouTubeSo for instance, when the Iraqi President Hussein said this is going to be the mother of all wars, he meant the paradigmatic war.
- So for instance, when the Iraqi President Hussein said this is going to be the mother of all wars, he meant the paradigmatic war.
- the United States decides that the way to handle this, to defeat the Russians quickly is by imposing on on the greatest, the mother of all sanctions.
- So so thank you for making the very clear point that speed of light uses the symbol C because it is the mother of all constants.
- If you rely on the mother of all inhumane weapons, and I have security concerns, why should I commit not to acquire other WMDS?
- You know, we dropped the big the, the big mother of all bombs.
Examples
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It's the home of the mother of all burgers.
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This is the mother of all challenges; no one has ever faced anything like it before.
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And then we have the mother of all lies.
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You know, we dropped the big the, the big mother of all bombs.
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You want to know what the mother of all bubbles was?
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This is the mother of all promises.
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"The mother of all battles is upon us.
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The mother of all evil is speculation.
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But the financial markets are now setting up for the mother of all collapses.
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Well, let's just say that 2012 has been the mother of all monsoons.
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Synonyms
70
1.0
Better than all others in quality or importance
How Extreme
Surface Forms
Morphology
mother + of + all
The noun 'mother' is used metaphorically here to signal an archetype or source, so a learner might infer that 'mother of all X' means an extreme or prototypical instance; however this superlative sense is a figurative extension rather than a straightforward compositional meaning of 'mother' + 'of' + 'all'. Because the connection is partial and relies on idiomatic/metaphorical use that is not fully predictable or universal across languages, it is only partially transparent to a B1 learner.
Etymology
Mother of all uses the image of a strong mother as the main or biggest example of something. So calling something the mother of all means it is the 'largest' or 'most extreme' of its kind.