Idioms

A big cheese

This expression is used to describe someone who is important and has a lot of influence. You might whisper in a restaurant: 'Look, that's Sarah Wong. She's a big cheese in the fashion world.'

You may be puzzled by the phrase. Certain kinds of cheese are like huge wheels, but apart from the size, you can hardly say they are important.

Cheese idioms are usually negative because some types of the food give a bad smell.

This phrase originally had nothing to do with cheese. The real word is 'chiz', which is used in India to express importance. He's the real chiz, the real thing.

Englishmen brought home quite a few Indian phrases and this one was made more familiar by being turned into cheese.

Big was added once it reached the United States and the term joined a long series of phrases meaning an important person: bigwig (when gentlemen all wore wigs), big shot (the world of guns and explosions), big banana (sounds good) and, most recent of all as Mexican food gains in