Word.ws English Dictionary

cash cows

cash cows is the plural of cash cow.

Meaning of cash cow

Noun

cash cow (plural cash cows)

  1. A product, service, or enterprise that generates ongoing, high net free cash flows.
    • The managers of a cash cow are primarily responsible for the generation of cash, and they should in principle be willing to give cash away to those other businesses in the portfolio which need it most.1980, D. J. Hall, M. A. Saias, “Strategy Follows Structure!”, in Strategic Management Journal, volume 1, number 2, page 181
  2. (broadly) Someone or something which is a dependable source of appreciable amounts of money.
    • Hollinger International, the owner of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, claimed in the 175-page filing that its former chief executive had treated the company as his "cash cow".2004 May 11, Dan Milmo, “Press tycoon Lord Black used company as ‘cash cow’, says $1.25bn lawsuit”, in The Guardian, retrieved 30 Oct 2008

Questions about cash cows

What is cash cows the plural of?
Cash cows is the plural of cash cow.

Words near cash cows in the dictionary

  1. cash card
  2. cash cards
  3. cash carrier
  4. cash carriers
  5. cash cow
  6. cash cows
  7. cash crop
  8. cash crops
  9. cash desk
  10. cash desks
  11. cash dispenser

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cash cows (page history and authors); cash cow (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “cash cows.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cash_cows. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.