Historian of physics Helge Kragh on the myth that Fred Hoyle coined the term "Big Bang" as a term of derision

Kragh, in his article "What's in a Name: History and Meanings of the Term “Big Bang”" writes:

It is possible that Gamow felt Hoyle’s “big bang” to be a pejorative phrase, but there is no documentation that either Gamow, Lemaître or other protagonists of explosion cosmologies at the time felt offended by the term – or that they paid attention to it at all. In any case, with the later success of the big bang theory it became common to see Hoyle’s neologism as an attempt to make the idea of an explosion universe, and Gamow’s version of it in particular, sound ridiculous. This is not how Hoyle saw it. At the time he seems to have considered it just an apt but innocent phrase for a theory he was opposed to, and he later insisted that he had not thought of it in a derogatory sense. In an interview of 1989, Alan Lightman asked him if he was really the source of the name. Hoyle answered "Well, I don’t know whether that’s correct, but nobody has challenged it, and I would have thought that if it were incorrect somebody would have said so. I was constantly striving over the radio – where I had no visual aids, nothing except the spoken word – for visual images. And that seemed to be one way of distinguishing between the steady-state and the explosive big bang. And so that was the language I used."

As a broadcaster Hoyle needed word pictures to get over technical and conceptual points, and “big bang” was one of them. When he had to explain the expansion of the universe, he made extensive use of the inflating-balloon image that had first been introduced by Eddington in 1931 to illustrate a positively curved space with increasing radius. Likewise, to illustrate the slow rate of matter creation in the steady state theory, Hoyle appealed to pictures familiar to all Britons. In his first BBC broadcast he explained that it would take about one billion years until a new atom was created in “a volume equal to a pint of milk bottle”. And the next year he said about the creation rate that it was “no more than the creation of one atom in the course of about a year in a volume equal to St. Paul’s Cathedral” The standard view, to be found in numerous books and articles, is the one reported in a popular book by Nobel laureate astrophysicist George Smoot and his coauthor Keay Davidson. “Hoyle had meant the term [big bang] to be derogatory,” they say, “but it was so compelling, so stirring of the imagination, that it stuck, but without the negative overtones”. As we shall see, it took twenty years until the term was seen as compelling and stirring of the imagination.