big data

noun

: an accumulation of data that is too large and complex for processing by traditional database management tools

Did you know?

Big data is a new addition to our language, but exactly how new is not an easy matter to determine. A 1980 paper by Charles Tilly provides an early documented use of big data, but Tilly wasn't using the word in the exact same way we use it today; rather, he used the phrase "big-data people" to refer to historians engaged in data-rich fields such as cliometrics. Today, big data can refer to large data sets or to systems and solutions developed to manage such large accumulations of data, as well as for the branch of computing devoted to this development. Francis X. Diebold, a University of Pennsylvania economist, who has written a paper exploring the origin of big data as a term, a phenomenon, and a field of study, believes the term "probably originated in lunch-table conversations at Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) in the mid 1990s…."

Examples of big data in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web Kathleen Walch is a thought leader, dynamic presenter and keynote speaker covering AI, ML, and big data use cases, applications, and best practices. —

Kathleen Walch, Forbes, 26 Oct. 2024 The company released its first big data dump, covering the first half of 2023, last December. —

Todd Spangler, Variety, 19 Sep. 2024 From the University of California, Berkeley, the top academic place for big data research using supercomputers, to LinkedIn, the home of the greatest batch and nearline data ingestion technologies, and finally to Snowflake, the center of cloud data innovation. —

Richard Meng, Forbes, 7 Oct. 2024 The figures will be contained in Netflix’s next big data dump, which will come out later this week and feature stats from the first six months of 2024. —

Max Goldbart, Deadline, 17 Sep. 2024 See all Example Sentences for big data

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'big data.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.