BIGTIME, adv.

[Thomas Paikeday]

I may be a bit behind the times, but I seem to be hearing "bigtime" used
adverbially more and more. The corpus I used for my last dictionary
doesn't go further back than 1989. I just checked it and there are just
two citations: "It failed bigtime" (AD'S MARKETING WEEK, 1990) and "It's
paying off bigtime" (OILWEEK, 1990).

"Small time" doesn't seem to be going the same way, not that it should,
though in the normal course, it would go from two words to hyphenated to
solid and in the process pass from noun phrase to adjective to adverb.

I guess we tend to think big rather than small.

TOM PAIKEDAY