Phrase guide
Definitions and examples are grouped by meaning. Pronunciation, history, word forms, translations, descendants, synonyms, antonyms, derived terms, and related words appear whenever the source provides them.
Sound
Each Play button uses your device's default local English voice, or a natural local fallback. The selected voice name appears after playback. This is synthesized speech, not a source recording.
noun
A question that is very important, difficult to answer, or (especially) both.
Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract
Usage: figuratively
No example sentence was provided for this meaning.
Synonyms: sixty-four dollar question, sixty-four thousand dollar question, billion-dollar question
Antonyms: none provided
noun
Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: a question to be decided, on whose answer depends a million-dollar expenditure.
Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract
No example sentence was provided for this meaning.
Synonyms: none provided
Antonyms: none provided
History
This collocation and its idiomatic meaning both long predate the TV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, whose last question involves a top prize of $1,000,000. They also predate the sixty-four thousand dollar question, which came from a TV game show that started in 1955 but clearly was itself influenced by similar existing constructions, including million-dollar question, which had this sense by 1927 at latest. The corpus shows that a burst of heightened popularity for such constructions occurred in the 1940s because of the radio program Take It or Leave It, which contained a sixty-four dollar question. All such collocations naming expensive questions seem to have their ultimate origins in literal instances (with various price tags) as managerial and public-debate issues; various examples of those are seen in publications from the 1910s.
Across languages
9 source translations are retained for this English entry.
