The modern pronunciation shows an irregular change of Early Modern English/ɛː/ to/eɪ/ in the standard language; contrast this with the development of other words such asbeat andheat.
“[…] the awfully hearty sort of Christmas cards that people do send to other people that they don't know at all well. You know. The kind that have mottoes like // Here's rattling good luck and roaring good cheer, / With lashings of food andgreat hogsheads of beer.[…]”
‘Children crawled over each other like little grey worms in the gutters,’ he said. ‘The only red things about them were their buttocks and they were raw. Their faces looked as if snails had slimed on them and their mothers were likegreat sick beasts whose byres had never been cleared.[…]’
Hidden behind thickets of acronyms and gorse bushes of detail, a newgreat game is under way across the globe. Some call it geoeconomics, but it's geopolitics too. The current power play consists of an extraordinary range of countries simultaneously sitting down to negotiate big free trade and investment agreements.
“We are engaged in agreat work, a treatise on our river fortifications, perhaps? But since when did army officers afford the luxury of amanuenses in this simple republic?”
1951 March, John W. Cline, “The Future of Medicine”, inNorthwest Medicine, volume50, number 3, Portland, Ore.: Northwest Medical Publishing Association,page165:
The first half of this century has been referred to as the golden age of medicine. To me it seems more probable that we are on the threshold of a muchgreater age.
He was thinking; but the glory of the song, the swell from thegreat organ, the clustered lights,[…], the height and vastness of this noble fane, its antiquity and its strength—all these things seemed to have their part as causes of the thrilling emotion that accompanied his thoughts.
The Dawn is over-caſt, the Morning low’rs, And heavily in Clouds brings on the Day, Thegreat, th’ important Day; big with the Fate OfCato and ofRome.
2008, George McCandless,The ABCs of RBCs, Harvard University Press, page 2:
The methods for finding parameters that are commonly used in RBC models include using coefficients that come from microeconomic studies for parameters like the time discount factor, rental income over total income for the parameters of a Cobb-Douglas production function, and adjusting parameters so that stationary state value values approach those of thegreat ratios such as consumption over income and capital over income.
2025 September 30, John H. Cochrane, “Brunner lecture”, inThe Grumpy Economist:
I’ll cover fiscal theory and the recent inflation (again!) of course, but also more recent thoughts on thegreat puzzle of monetary economics, how central banks can lower inflation by raising nominal interest rates.
(qualifying nouns of family relationship) Involvingmore generations than the qualified word implies — as many extra generations as repetitions of the wordgreat (from 1510s). [see Derived terms]
Moderating adverbs such asfairly,somewhat, etc. tend not to be used withgreat. Some intensifiers can be used with some senses ofgreat; for example,a very great amount,a very great man,the party was really great, though not*the party was very great.
The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions atWiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
Sadio Mané wasted a glorious chance in the first half and, late on, Mohamed Salah turned his shot against a post after a goal-line clearance had spun his way. That, in a nutshell, perhaps sums up the difference between Messi and the players on the next rung below – the ones who can be described as great footballers without necessarily being footballgreats.
(in combinations such as "two-greats", "three-greats" etc.) An instance of the word "great" signifying an additional generation in phrases expressing family relationships.
^McDavid, Raven Ioor Jr. (1966), “59. Review of Thomas 1958 and Bronstein 1960:An Introduction to the Phonetics of American English, 2nd Edition,The Pronunciation of American English: An Introduction to Phonetics”, in William A. Kretzschmar, Jr., editor,Dialects in culture: essays in general dialectology[1],University, Alabama:The University of Alabama Press, published1979,→ISBN,→OCLC,page382.
