big data
noun
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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
IEEE Spectrum, 10 Dec. 2024
The big data center buildout: Booming power consumption from data centers in the coming years offers a growing market for Coterra’s natural gas .
—Paulina Likos, CNBC, 29 Nov. 2024
How well does this narrative stack up against the latest big data insights?
—Diana Spehar, Forbes, 6 Dec. 2024
Nielsen’s panel-only figures have Thursday Night Football at 13.2 million viewers per game this season; the big data addition pushes the audience up to 14.26 million, a gain of more than a million viewers (about 8 percent).
—Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter, 25 Nov. 2024
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Cite this Entry
“Big data.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/big%20data. Accessed 30 Dec. 2024.
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