Definition of "sweeping" []

• Having wide-ranging influence or effect: sweeping changes. (adjective)
• Moving in or as if in a wide curve: a sweeping gesture; a sweeping glance. (adjective)
• Indiscriminate; wholesale: sweeping generalizations. (adjective)
• Overwhelming; complete: a sweeping victory. (adjective)
• The action of one that sweeps. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "If a moiety of sweeping the kennel from the Mews-gate to the Irish coffee-house opposite to it, could fetch a good price, and I was a witness once that it did, to an unfortunate beggar-woman, who was obliged by sickness to part with half of it; what might not a beggar expect, who had the _sweeping_ of the _Pont du Gard_; or a monk, who erected a confessional box near it for the benefit of _himself_, and the fouls of poor travellers?"
• "The government in July said it would set up a regulator outside of the ministry and in August, the previous minister, Banri Kaieda, fired the country's top energy bureaucrats in what he called "sweeping" changes."
• "The girls 'father, Giuseppe De Vito, disappeared in 2006 when the RCMP issued a warrant for his arrest as part of what they called a sweeping crackdown on organized crime."