ill-gotten gains
ill-gotten gains noun: money or other property acquired dishonestly.
Noun
ill-gotten gains pl (plural only)
- Money or other property acquired dishonestly.
- Was it her fault if she did not possess those sycophantic arts which her hypocritical nephew, Pitt Crawley, practised? She wished him all the happiness which he merited out of his ill-gotten gains.1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter XXXIX, in Vanity Fair […], London: Bradbury and Evans […], published 1848, →OCLC
- Secondly, the highly reprehensible course pursued by the Free Church of Scotland, in soliciting, receiving, and retaining money in its sustentation fund for supporting the gospel in Scotland, which was evidently the ill-gotten gain of slaveholders and slave-traders.1855, Frederick Douglass, “Life as a Freeman”, in My Bondage and My Freedom. […], New York; Auburn, N.Y.: Miller, Orton & Mulligan […], →OCLC, part II (Life as a Freeman), page 380
- Synonyms:
- dirty money
Synonyms of ill-gotten gains
Origin of ill-gotten gains
Perhaps extracted from ill-gotten gains never prosper.
Questions about ill-gotten gains
- What does ill-gotten gains mean?
- Ill-gotten gains means money or other property acquired dishonestly.
- What part of speech is ill-gotten gains?
- Ill-gotten gains is a noun.
Words near ill-gotten gains in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: ill-gotten gains (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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