Word.ws English Dictionary

mad money

mad money noun: a sum of money, often relatively small in amount, kept in reserve to use for impulsive, frivolous purposes.

Noun

mad money (uncountable)

  1. (idiomatic) A sum of money, often relatively small in amount, kept in reserve to use for impulsive, frivolous purposes.
    • Ultrasuede minibags "are just the solution for waste." And for crime. Most minis hardly hold more than mad money and a comb.1975 November 10, “Baglets”, in Time
  2. (idiomatic) A sum of money kept in reserve or to insulate oneself financially in the event of the sudden breakdown of a relationship in which one is economically dependent.
    • Such an expression is mad money, noted as early as 1922 by Howard J. Savage (Dialect Notes 5:148) at the end of an article on Bryn Mawr slang. Savage's definition is 'money a girl carries in case she has a row with her escort and wishes to go home alone.'1975, George Javor, “Mad Money: A Semantic Change”, in American Speech, vol. 50, no. 1/2, p. 155

Questions about mad money

What does mad money mean?
Mad money means a sum of money, often relatively small in amount, kept in reserve to use for impulsive, frivolous purposes.
What part of speech is mad money?
Mad money is a noun.

Words near mad money in the dictionary

  1. mad man
  2. Mad Max
  3. mad men
  4. mad minute
  5. mad minutes
  6. mad money
  7. mad on
  8. mad ons
  9. mad professor
  10. mad professors
  11. mad props

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mad money (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-mad money.ogg.

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