big wig

The popular story

The usual account of bigwig is refreshingly simple. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a man of consequence advertised his standing on his head. Judges, bishops, physicians, aristocrats and members of parliament wore wigs, and the grander the man, the larger and more elaborate the wig he could afford to wear. A bigwig, the story goes, was quite literally a person under a big wig — and by extension anyone important, powerful or self-important.

What makes this idiom worth an entry is not that the story is doubtful, but that it is one of the small handful of popular explanations that turn out to be correct. So many origin tales dissolve on inspection into Victorian guesswork. This one survives it.

What the record shows

The fashion behind the phrase is well documented. Large wigs came into vogue at the French court: Louis XIII took to wearing a wig to disguise premature baldness, and under Louis XIV the wig became all but obligatory for nobility and “persons of quality” across Europe. The bigger and more powdered the wig, the more it cost and the more leisure and rank it implied. By the eighteenth century the connection between an imposing wig and social importance was a commonplace that any reader would have understood at once.

The word itself follows the fashion. The literal phrase — a “big wig” meaning a large physical wig — is on record in Oliver Goldsmith’s 1759 essay On Dress, where a doctor is described as wearing:

the young doctor a big wig, merely to please me

The transferred sense — a big wig meaning an important person — appears a little later. The earliest example cited for the human sense is from 1772, in a song by the actor and writer George Alexander Stevens, where the phrase is still written as the two-word, capitalised noun phrase “big Wigs” and refers to eminent physicians. By 1788, in Joseph Atkinson’s play A Match for a Widow, the phrase is italicised as a recognised single expression for important people. Reference works differ on the precise date to headline — Etymonline gives 1781, the OED’s earliest evidence for the fused headword is later still — but all point to the same window: the term for the person emerges in the second half of the eighteenth century, exactly when large wigs were at the height of their association with rank.

The verdict

This is an attested origin whose folk explanation happens to be true. The chain is unbroken and visible in the record: a real fashion in which important men wore large wigs; a literal phrase for the garment (Goldsmith, 1759); and a figurative phrase for the wearer that appears while the fashion was still current (from the 1770s). No leap of imagination or unrecorded intermediate is required. The obvious reading is the historical one.

It is worth flagging one persistent muddle. Because bigwig and Whig sound alike, people sometimes assume a link to the political party. There is none. Bigwig is transparently big plus wig; the party name Whig derives from a quite separate Scottish word and has nothing to do with headgear. The resemblance is pure coincidence.

How it changed

Two shifts are worth noting. First, the phrase fused. What began as an adjective-plus-noun description — a big wig, a large item of dress — hardened over the nineteenth century into the single word bigwig, a noun in its own right meaning a person. This is the ordinary life-cycle of an idiom: the literal image is worn smooth until only the figurative meaning remains, and the spelling closes up to match.

Second, the tone drifted. Early uses could be neutrally descriptive — a bigwig was simply a person of standing. Modern use is more often faintly mocking. To call someone a bigwig today is usually to note their importance while gently puncturing it, implying a certain pomposity or remoteness from ordinary concerns. The wig, long gone from daily dress, survives only as a metaphor for inflated self-regard.

Interestingly, the earliest human uses cluster around physicians rather than judges or politicians, the figures we might now think of first. The wig as a badge of medical authority — the imposing doctor at the bedside — seems to have been an especially vivid image for eighteenth-century readers before the term broadened to cover important people of every kind.

Usage today

Wigs disappeared from everyday dress long ago, surviving in Britain chiefly in the courtroom, yet the idiom is entirely alive. We speak of company bigwigs, party bigwigs, the bigwigs at head office — always with that undertone of importance mixed with irony. Related expressions such as big cheese, big shot and top brass occupy the same territory, but only bigwig carries the specific, faintly absurd image of a person dwarfed by their own hairpiece.

It is a satisfying case for anyone interested in how phrases are made. The literal object vanished from the streets more than two centuries ago; the metaphor it left behind is used daily by people who have never seen a powdered wig outside a portrait or a period drama. The image outlived the thing.

There is a further reason the idiom stuck. Wigs were expensive, conspicuous and troublesome to maintain — powdered, curled, and prone to attracting vermin — so wearing a large one was a deliberate display of means as much as of office. The bigger the wig, the more plainly its owner announced that he could afford not to work with his hands. That economic edge is part of why the word carries its faint sneer: a bigwig is not merely important but visibly, expensively so, and the phrase has always been available to those who found such display a little absurd.

The one visible survival of the fashion sharpens the point. In Britain, senior judges and barristers still wear wigs in certain courts, and it is no accident that the modern reader instinctively pictures a judge when the word is used. The courtroom preserved, in miniature, the very equation the idiom rests on: wig equals authority. Everywhere else the wigs came off, but the metaphor they generated stayed on, doing daily work in a language that no longer needs the object at all.