 Embiggen — in the context in which it is used in the episode — is a verb that was coined independently by Dan Greaney in 1996 . The literal meaning is to make something larger , with the morphology ( <unk> + big + -en ) being parallel to that of enlarge ( <unk> + large ) . The verb had in fact previously occurred in an 1884 edition of the British journal Notes and Queries : A Medium of <unk> for Literary Men , General Readers , Etc. by C. A. Ward , in the sentence " but the people magnified them , to make great or embiggen , if we may invent an English parallel as ugly . After all , use is nearly everything . " The word has made its way to common use and was included in Mark Peters ' Yada , Yada , Do 'h ! , 111 Television Words That Made the Leap From the Screen to Society , but as of 2014 it was not included in the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary . In particular , embiggen can be found in string theory . The first occurrence of the word was in the journal High Energy Physics in the article " Gauge / gravity duality and meta @-@ stable dynamical supersymmetry breaking " , which was published on January 23 , 2007 . For example , the article says : " For large P , the three @-@ form fluxes are dilute , and the gradient of the Myers potential encouraging an anti @-@ D3 to embiggen is very mild . " Later this usage was noted in the journal Nature , which explained that in this context , it means to grow or expand . 
