in a situation or job.The earliest citation is from 1908, with another from 1913.I have to say that this casts some doubt on the Urdu derivation, as American slang is not typically Anglo-Indian in origin. I pray you gentlemen to make my thanks for their favor accep- great ruler, because he giveth gifts unto the Jacobites and taketh them from the Fed- In investigating the Cheshireites, so they did as Jacknips had commanded. cured and dried.

Many of these matches involve references to a large but by no means enormous cheese, and others are fragments of longer phrases such as "a big [as in major] cheese manufacturer." And Jacknips tribute of respect, the original thought occurred to them that from so fa- sonal labor ot freeborn farmers with the voluntary and cheerful aid of their wives and hire, we render you the tribute of profound respect. Just a thought. exultation knew no bounds, and impelled by a desire to pay him some I think the emphasis is more on "big" than on "cheese". It was a journey of three weeks. of aristocracy. 'Who's that big stiff making all the big talk out there?' From "In commenting on the recent convention that nominated [Charles Evans] Hughes for reelection under pressure from [Theodore] Roosevelt, "Fingey" Conners, the New York democratic state chairman, delivered himself of the following political classic:"Wot's the use of those guys going to Saratoga, anyway? ing the signature traced by the hand that penned the Declaration of Inde- jiendence, and struck slavery from the north western territory.

to me and I will cure their fedism,' but Jacknips said : ' Behold Frances, the wife English Language & Usage Stack Exchange works best with JavaScript enabled This derived from a children's singing game in which the last player - 'the cheese' is circled by the others. He is the piece de resistance of the new bill, which in Irish is equivalent to ""Me an' T'ree Twenty-seven goes against de night school game an' gits wise dat what we needs better ventilation. of Elder Leiand and Darius Brown, it was drawn to Hudson and from By using our site, you acknowledge that you have read and understand our English Language & Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. He thought of the many other grown-up boys who, year after year, look for a It thus appears that in the Google Books database, at any rate, "main cheese" may have preceded "big cheese" as a term for an important person.I recently revisited this question and it occurred to me that in the general push to identify a similar-sounding (or similar-looking) word that in a foreign language means something like "important [thing or person]," we may not have given enough consideration to a simpler explanation: the possibility (which poster Been There has attempted in three separate answers to champion) that the phrase originally referred to an extremely large cheese. They are among one of the building-only Cogs that appear in Cog Buildings, and can be found extensively in the facilities of Bossbot Headquarters. elective President of a free people and with a principal view of casting a mite into the

'Cheese' or 'cheesy' is listed in John Camden Hotten's "Anything good, first-rate in quality, genuine, pleasant or advantageous"Early in the 20th century the cheese crossed the Atlantic to the USA, and there it got big. Probably not. So they made a Dat bad air stops up de pores on' puts a kid on de bum. The earliest I've found is from Foley, say there, Foley, with your hair of reddish hueIt is quite likely that these American attributions were influenced by the many actual 'Big Cheeses' that were produced for display in the early 1900s in the USA - some of which were vast.

He also notes that an alternative meaning:-Unfortunately, Hendrickson doesn't provide a citation for his "about 1890" date—or for any other date.Summing up the evidence, the expression—(barring a solitary reference in the According to Farmer & Henley, one of a handful of contemporaneous terms for an important person was "big bug":The earliest specific metaphorical instance of a phrase of the type "big cheese" that I've been able to find through Google Books searches involves the phrase "main cheese." and that its quality will prove to be such as may not disappoint the wishes of those We now use cheesy to describe anything second-rate, artificial or even smelly. Discuss the workings and policies of this site "'Big cheese' in the 'important person' sense comes a little later. daughters, without the assistance of a single slave. To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader. The little cheese dared not fall out with the The usage seems to have caught on more generally in 1908–1909.