how big (of) a problem?

May 18, 2026

Tibs wrote to me in October 2020:

     A few years ago, Americans started adding “of” in places it didn’t occur before. It gradually spread into books, and across the atlantic to here as well.  

I don’t have an exact timing - less than 10 years?  

I find it hard to remember examples, because it’s become part of the scenery, but it’s always a case where leaving out the “of” leaves the meaning identical  

For instance: not that big [of] a deal ... as ordinary [of] a childhood as possible (this one from The Boys on Netflix)

My apologies, Tibs, for making you wait so long. Here we go!

What is it?

Linguist Harold Allen gave the change a tongue-in-cheek name: the Big of Syndrome. The adjective involved need not be big, of course. (Still, I'll use big of a lot here, because it's easier to find examples.)

Let's look at the elements of a big-of expression:
  • an adverbial element (e.g., as, how, quite, so, this/that, too) that's indicating 'measurement' of the adjective
  • a gradable adjective  (i.e. the ones that can go with those 'measurement' expressions)
  • of  [which is not there in the older form]
  • an indefinite noun phrase: usually one starting with a or an like an idea or a child; more unusually, you can find it with an indefinite (i.e. bare) plural or, even more rarely, a bare non-count noun [see examples 3 and 4 below, respectively]. 
That gives us the possibility of phrases like these (from the Corpus of Contemporary American English):
  1. cacao provides habitat that is of as high of a quality as their natural forests (wisc.edu)
  2. Seems like I took too long of a break.(ER [tv])
  3.  no matter how great their sacrifice or how big of heroes they might be (comment on a CNN blog)
  4. I asked him about how big of threat is ISIS to America's national security (CBS Face the Nation)
Notice in example 3 we have both the traditional structure—how+ADJ+NOUN PHRASE (in blue)—and the new structure how+ADJ+of+NOUN PHRASE. Even if you have the big-of syndrome, you don't add of if the adjective precedes a definite noun phrase like the heroes or their sacrifice. And example 4—it's just a bit too weird, but we'll come back to that. 

Why did people start saying it?

There are two reasons that big a deal might become big of a deal. One is that both of and a reduce to [É™] ('uh') in informal or fast speech (Rapp 1991). So, people hearing big É™ deal might internali{s/z}e and learn it as big a deal or big of deal. I think that might be what's going on with example 4 —it might be that the transcript of the television program[me] has mistaken a threat for of threat.

But big of a deal has both of and a; we'd probably expect there to be two syllables even in fast speech. So I'm not convinced that the 'reduced pronunciation' explanation can explain the whole situation. I think we need the second reason. 

The second reason is that this seems to be a case of analogical change. To quote Lyle Campbell: 

     In analogical change, one pattern or piece of the language changes to become more like another pattern or piece of the language, where speakers perceive the changing part as similar to the pattern or piece that it changes to be more like. (2020: 87)

The pattern that big-of sayers are imitating is the pattern that English already uses for much, as in: 
      How much of a problem is that going to be? Too much of a problem.
No one says *How much a problem or *Too much a problem.

Why try to make how big a problem more like how much of a problem? Well, first, you can probably see the semantic similarity there: both are asking about the extent of the problem. So, they may be perceived as belonging to the same pattern.  (Interestingly, how much of a is fairly rare in the 19th century according to the Corpus of Historical American English. Too much of a is older. But I can't distract myself with that right now. I've already spent a whole day on this post.)

There's probably also some discomfort with the (standard) of-less version due to the fact that we don't usually have adjectives before noun phrases (big a problem). Adjectives usually go in noun phrases (a big problem). When noun phrases seem unconnected to other parts of an English sentence, of is often the glue that sticks the noun onto the sentence. Since of is the most semantically empty (meaningless) preposition, it makes no difference to the meaning if we add it in.

When did people start saying it? And which people?

Harold Allen named The Big of Syndrome in the mid–late 1980s (he had died in 1988 before his [AmE linguist-speak] squib was published in American Speech). Allen had noticed expressions like this big of a crowd and that nice of a day ("an innovating syntactic aberration") in the Minnesota speech around him, and urged linguists to study it further. Linda Rapp took up the call and published another short article in 1991. 

Rapp found several examples from 1943 in Harold Wentworth's 1944 American Dialect Dictionary. Wentworth's examples seem to be from West Virginia and central Florida. Another early-ish example (1962) comes from The Andy Griffith Show, which takes place in a (fictional) small town in North Carolina. So those seem like hints that it might have come from the inland southeast. 

But since, unlike Rapp, I'm working in the Age of Linguistic Corpora, I've been able to find it in some earlier examples. These are from the Movie Corpus.

1932US/CAThe Death Kiss  If I'm any good of a guesser, he ought to be here by now. 
1939US/CAThe Little Princess  a cup of tea? - Oh no thank you. We're in too big of a hurry. Oh, I see. 
1942TV/MOVLure of the Surf  All right. Here. (Miles) I really think it's not that big of a deal. 

I had a quick look for the screenwriters' birthplaces—The Death Kiss = Alabama and Hungary and The Little Princess = California and Wisconsin. No one will admit to writing Lure of the Surf (which was apparently mocked for promoting sea fishing while sensible people were worried about U-boats), but the 'self-narrator' was from the Bronx. So, only one of those writers fits with the inland-southeast origin story. All of this is pointing to it being widespread in spoken American English even earlier. If people were saying it in (orig. AmE) movies without comment in the 1930s, it must have felt at least somewhat natural by then. 

Still, before the 1980s, the corpus examples are few and far between. Allen wrote about the "syndrome" just as this pattern was finding real purchase in published English as well as spoken, with how big of a deal leading the way:
     Tibs thought he'd only heard the pattern in the past decade. That could be a case of Recency Illusion, or it could be that people in Britain just didn't hear it (or read it) much until the internet age. Sticking with big and deal (because the numbers are easiest to see), we can see it really taking off in the 2000s in published and performed American English. (Sorry, the text in these screenshots is not very clear, but know that the darker the blue, the more typical of a decade the phrase is. We can see big of a deal strongly associated with the 2000s, and much more so the 2010s. Neither of these corpora go into the 2020s.)

big of a deal in COCA
big of a deal in The Movie Corpus

Just to underscore the Americanness of the expression: at the right end of the Movie Corpus screenshot, it shows that 145 of the examples came from a North American film. Only 4 came from British or Irish films. 

Is it British yet?

The of has been coming to Britain, as Tibs noted. The table below shows how often big of a deal/difference occur per million words in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (collected in 2012–13) and the News on the Web corpus (2010-now). In the news corpus, the BrE rate is 4 times lower than the AmE rate for each expression. The news data has a lot fewer of these expressions, presumably because the corpus has more professionally composed and edited text. The British news sources use the expressions at a quarter of the rate of the American news.


  US 2010s
web		    UK 2010s
web
     US 2010+
news		    UK 2010+
news
big of a deal  .78 .14.36.09
big of a difference  .06 .03.04.01

And how is the old version doing?


Even though the of version is on the rise, the of-less version is still standard in print—in both countries.  


Other SbaCL posts about of


References

Allen, Harold B. 1989. The Big of Syndrome. American Speech 64, 94–96. https://doi.org/10.2307/455116 
Campbell, Lyle. 2020. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh University Press. 
Rapp, Linda L. 1991. The Big of Syndrome: An Update. American Speech 66, 213–20. doi:10.2307/455893.
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1 comment

  1. lynneguist18 May, 2026 00:32

    The formatting of/around the ngrams is really annoying. My apologies!

    ReplyDelete

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Abbr.

AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)