million-dollar question
A question that is very important, difficult to answer, or bothA question that is very important, difficult to answer, or (especially) both.
Meaning
2 senses(figuratively)A question that is very important, difficult to answer, or (especially) both.
Preisfrage
вопрос на миллионvopros na million
Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: a question to be decided, on whose answer depends a million-dollar expenditure.
Translations
4 languagesBy meaning 1
By meaning 1
Origin
This collocation and its idiomatic meaning both long predate the TV game show Who Wants toThis collocation and its idiomatic meaning both long predate the TV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, whose last question involves a top prize of $1,000,000. They also predate the sixty-four thousand dollar question, which came from a TV game show that started in 1955 but clearly was itself influenced by similar existing constructions, including million-dollar question, which had this sense by 1927 at latest. The corpus shows that a burst of heightened popularity for such constructions occurred in the 1940s because of the radio program Take It or Leave It, which contained a sixty-four dollar question. All such collocations naming expensive questions seem to have their ultimate origins in literal instances (with various price tags) as managerial and public-debate issues; various examples of those are seen in publications from the 1910s.
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Forms
plural: million-dollar questions| Singular | million-dollar question |
|---|---|
| Plural | million-dollar questions |
regular