When I am writing an article, from time to time, I am not sure which adjective to use when describing that something is significant (or insignificant).
- My current problem is: significant advance in satellite communication. Is there any commonly used adjective for that? (large advance, vast advance, big advance,..)
Also there was a similar question: Large, huge or big
communities?In general, are there rules regarding this matter? Or the only thing what one can do is to get used to the right combination and search on web-pages like Google Ngram Viewer or Corpus of historical American English ?
Answer
Significant means meaningful; it says nothing about magnitude. A small advance may be significant:
Gene analysis based on work done by the publicly funded Human Genome Project may have moved science a small but significant step closer to finding a better treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.
By the same token, a large advance may be insignificant:
This tonnage represent a very large advance in airborne volume, but is still insignificant relative to over-the-road volume.
So if you mean significant, write significant – don’t replace it with big or large or huge. If however you are talking about magnitude, let usage guide you; consulting a corpus is a very good idea. (But at the BYU site you want COCA, Corpus of Contemporary American Usage, or BNC, British National Corpus, rather than COHA.) Large and big vary idiomatically; huge, however, signifies a much greater magnitude than either of those, amazingly large, and in formal usage will suggest you are speaking hyperbolically unless you can substantiate the choice.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : MasterPJ , Answer Author : StoneyB on hiatus
