“Big budget” vs. “large budget” — which one to use? [closed]

Question

What is the difference between big and large? I am trying to use one of these words but I'm skeptical which one is the right one.

The context I intend to use one of these words in is:

Small companies don't have big/large budgets.

So which one is the better choice?

Answer 1

The usage stats from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) look as follows:

                       BNC      COCA      

big/large budget      10/9     98/22     
big/large budgets      3/3     25/16      

So on the east side of the pond, it's a tie, while on the west side, big is preferred.

(The numbers have been manually corrected to exclude — lots and lots of — occurences of large budget deficits/surpluses/cuts/increases, big budget crisis/fight/debate/gap/deal, etc.)

Answer 2

I'm not aware of any difference in meaning. Often words that we call synonyms have subtle differences in connotation, but in this case, I'm hard pressed to think of any distinction. I don't know why we have both words in English. Use either one.

Answer 3

"Large" will always sound [fractionally] more formal than "big" so if in doubt, and you want to sound formal, I would suggest to use "large."

It can also be complicated by context. Recently I corrected "Make a big noise" (referring to the impact of PR events) to "Make a lot of noise."

Not a great improvement, I know, but I felt that "a big noise" simply sounds childish.

Answer 4

It depends on the rest of the article. Both are acceptable. You may be using large/big to refer to the non-small companies, so you might want to keep the same phrase when discussing the size of the budgets.