BIG CHEESE
[Q] From Edward Teague: “What is the origin of the term big cheese as in ‘He’s a big cheese in the rugby world’?”
[A] There’s no shortage of expressions invoking cheese: one may be cheesed off (miserable, annoyed, fed up), or something may be cheesy (cheap, unpleasant or blatantly inauthentic). These refer to the unhappy habit of ripe cheese making its presence known to anyone within sniffing distance.
But big cheese has a quite different origin, based in the only positive slang sense of cheese that seems ever to have existed. This was first recorded in London in the early part of the nineteenth century, with the sense of “good, first-rate in quality, genuine, pleasant or advantageous”.
Originally it had nothing to do with cheese — the source is the Persian or Hindi word chiz, meaning a thing. Sir Henry Yule wrote it up in Hobson-Jobson, his famous Anglo-Indian Dictionary of 1886. He said that the expression “used to be common among Anglo-Indians” and cites expressions such as “My new Arab is the real chiz” and “These cheroots are the real chiz”. Another expression with the same meaning that predated the real chiz was the real thing, so it’s highly probable that Anglo-Indians changed thing to chiz as a bilingual joke. Once returnees from India started to use it in Britain, hearers naturally enough converted the unfamiliar foreign word into something more recognisable, and it became cheese.
The phrase big cheese developed from it in early twentieth-century America, as a term to describe the most influential or important person in a group. The first written example we know about is in Ring Lardner’s Haircut of 1914. It followed on several other American phrases containing big to describe a person of this kind, most with animal or vegetable associations — big bug, big potato, big fish and big toad, of which the oldest is probably the British English bigwig of the eighteenth century (more recent examples are big shot, big enchilada and big banana). Like the others, big cheese was by no means always complimentary and often had derisive undertones, no doubt helped along by the influence of other slang meanings of cheese.
