Idiom
big bucks
Meaning
Lots of money.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“She hopes to earn big bucks at her new job.”
“Many people move to the city because they think they can make big bucks in the finance industry.”
“While the startup promised big bucks to its early investors, the company ultimately failed to turn a profit and collapsed within a year.”
Examples
simple
“She hopes to earn big bucks at her new job.”
contextual
“Many people move to the city because they think they can make big bucks in the finance industry.”
complex
“While the startup promised big bucks to its early investors, the company ultimately failed to turn a profit and collapsed within a year.”
Origin
Big bucks means a large amount of money, and buck has meant a dollar since the American frontier of the 1700s. Back then deerskins, or buckskins, were a standard and widely accepted form of currency, used for trade long before the official U.S. dollar existed. Settlers and traders bartered animal pelts with Native American tribes; a buckskin was durable, universally valued, and effectively served as a single unit of money.
The usage is recorded directly. In a 1748 journal entry, the Pennsylvania Dutch pioneer Conrad Weiser noted that someone was robbed of 300 bucks worth of goods, and that five bucks would buy a cask of whiskey. In 1824, in Sketches of North American Indians, James Buchanan wrote that each buck-skin was one dollar.
Key words
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