Example
large (adjective)
The neutral, slightly more formal swap. Natural with numbers and amounts.
A large number of students work part-time.
Written by Fizza Butool Zaidi and Ali Zaidi
13 alternatives
The neutral, slightly more formal swap. Natural with numbers and amounts.
A large number of students work part-time.
Very big; emphatic.
There's a huge shopping centre just outside my city.
Extremely large.
The new stadium is enormous; it holds 80,000 people.
Very large in area or amount.
The vast majority of commuters travel by train.
Very large; informal emphasis.
There was a massive queue outside the new café.
Large in amount or degree; formal.
The project required a considerable amount of money.
Large and important; often amounts of money.
Building the new bridge required a substantial investment from the council.
Large in importance or seriousness; before a noun.
Housing is a major issue for young people.
With a lot of room; for homes, rooms, cars.
Our new flat is much more spacious than the old one.
Covering a large area or range.
The city has an extensive cycle network.
Fairly large.
A sizeable number of residents opposed the plan.
Natural with traffic, rain, smoking, losses.
There's always heavy traffic on the ring road.
Don't swap blindly: 'Big traffic' and 'big rain' are wrong; say heavy.
For height of people, buildings and trees.
Some of the tallest buildings in the country are in my city.
Don't swap blindly: Use tall for height; a 'big building' suggests size, not height.
Paraphrasing
Band tip: the public IELTS Writing band descriptors for Lexical Resource describe Band 7 as using “less common lexical items” with “some awareness of style and collocation”. A synonym that changes your meaning or breaks a collocation works against you, so choose the word that fits the sentence, not the rarest one you know.
In context
I'd like to talk about the central library in my city. It's an enormous glass building, one of the tallest in the area, and inside it's surprisingly spacious, with reading rooms on every floor. What I like most is that it has an extensive collection of foreign films, so I spend a huge amount of time there at weekends.
Huge, enormous and massive for emphasis; large for neutral size; spacious for rooms; major for importance; heavy for traffic and rain.
It is fine in both Speaking and Writing. 'The vast majority' is especially common and natural.
English uses heavy for traffic, rain and smoking. It is a collocation, so 'big' sounds wrong even though the meaning is clear.
Usually. Large is more neutral and formal, and it collocates with number, amount and proportion. 'A big number of' is unnatural.
Practise
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