greatadj/ˈɡɹeɪt/

• 1

  Taking much space; large.

  • “[…] 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 and great 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 like great sick beasts whose byres had never been cleared.[…]’
• 2

  Taking much space; large.

  • great worry
  • “We are engaged in a great work, a treatise on our river fortifications, perhaps? But since when did army officers afford the luxury of amanuenses in this simple republic?”
• 3

  informalTaking much space; large.

  • a dirty great smack in the face
  • Great Scott!
• 4

  informalVery good; excellent; wonderful; fantastic.

  • Dinner was great.
  • He was thinking; but the glory of the song, the swell from the great 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.
• 5

  Important, consequential.

  • a great dilemma
  • a great decision
• 6

  Involving more generations than the qualified word implies — as many extra generations as repetitions of the word great (from 1510s).

  • great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, great-great-great-grandfather
• 7

  obsoletePregnant; large with young; full of.

  • great with child
  • great with hope
• 8

  obsoleteIntimate; familiar.

  • those that are so great with him

greatintj/ˈɡɹeɪt/

• 1

  Expression of gladness and content about something.

  • Great! Thanks for the wonderful work.
  • —I am in my new apartment! —Great!
• 2

  A sarcastic inversion thereof.

  • Oh, great! I just dumped all 500 sheets of the manuscript all over and now I have to put them back in order.

greatnoun/ˈɡɹeɪt/

• 1

  A person of major significance, accomplishment or acclaim.

  • Newton and Einstein are two of the greats of the history of science.
  • 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 football greats.
• 2

  entertainmentlifestylemusicThe main division in a pipe organ, usually the loudest division.

• 3

  An instance of the word great signifying an additional generation in phrases expressing family relationships.

  • my three-greats grandmother
• 4

  rareinformalA great-grandparent.

  • I knew my great-gran, but no one really believed the Montez story until we saw photos of the sinous dancer. My great was the spiitng^([sic]) image of HER great.
  • On my Ma's side, I have a whole lotta Scot (Ferguson), with some Irish, and her maternal gandpa^([sic]) (my great) was from Trieste, so also Italian-Austrian-Slovenian.

greatadv/ˈɡɹeɪt/

• 1

  informalVery well (in a very satisfactory manner).

  • Those mechanical colored pencils work great because they don’t have to be sharpened.