lion's share

noun

the largest part or share, especially a disproportionate portion: The eldest son received the lion's share of the estate.

Origin:
1780–90; probably after Aesop's fable in which the lion claimed all the spoils of a hunt

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2013.
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Link To lion's share

American Heritage

Cultural Dictionary

lion's share definition

A disproportionately large segment of the whole: “Though we always divided our winnings, somehow Barton always seemed to end up with the lion's share.”

The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition
Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Relevant Questions

What Is The Lions Share?

00:10

Lion's share is always a great word to know.

So is slumgullion. Does it mean:

a stew of meat, vegetables, potatoes, etc.

a fool or simpleton; ninny.

LEARN MORE UNUSUAL WORDS WITH WORD DYNAMO...

Slang Dictionary

lion's share definition

n.
the largest portion. : I earn a lot, but the lion's share goes for taxes.

Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions by Richard A. Spears.Fourth Edition.
Copyright 2007. Published by McGraw Hill.
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American Heritage

Idioms & Phrases

lion's share

The greater part or most of something, as in Whenever they won a doubles match, Ethel claimed the lion's share of the credit, or As usual, Uncle Bob took the lion's share of the cake. This expression alludes to Aesop's fable about a lion, who got all of a kill because its fellow hunters, an ass, fox, and wolf, were afraid to claim their share. [Late 1700s]

The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer.
Copyright © 1997. Published by Houghton Mifflin.
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Example sentences

But both will pump yet more government cash into the plains, with the lion's

share going to big farmers.

But the lion's share of the illegal cash went into the law firm.

In the same time maintenance costs and even acquisition costs are reduced,

since power plants are a lion's share here.

Generating units are chosen to run primarily on their operating costs, of which

fuel costs account for the lion's share.

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Matching Quote

"Computers were originally just supposed to be number-crunchers, but now their number-crunching has been harnessed in a thousand imaginative ways to create new virtual machines, such as video games and word processors, in which the underlying number-crunching is almost invisible, and in which new powers seem quite magical. Our brains, similarly, weren't designed (except for some very recent peripheral organs) for word processing, but now a large portion—perhaps even the lion's share—of the activity that takes place in adult human brains is involved in a sort of word processing: speech production and comprehension, and the serial rehearsal and rearrangement of linguistic items, or better, their neural surrogates. And these activities magnify and transform the underlying hardware powers in ways that seem (from the "outside") quite magical."

-Daniel Clement Dennett

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