Word.ws English Dictionary

sleeping partners

sleeping partners is the plural of sleeping partner.

Meaning of sleeping partner

Noun

sleeping partner (plural sleeping partners)

  1. (Ireland, UK) A business partner who doesn't play an active role in running the day-to-day operations of a business, who instead, finances the business in the form of capital investment.
    • Somewhat later, the Frenchman Charles Fourier was ridiculed for expecting day by day the sleeping-partner to turn up who would invest in his Phalanstère plan, which was based on ideas very similar to those sponsored by one of the greatest contemporary experts on finance.1957 [1944], Karl Polanyi, chapter 9, in The Great Transformation, Beacon Press: Boston, page 108
    Synonyms:
    silent partner

Questions about sleeping partners

What is sleeping partners the plural of?
Sleeping partners is the plural of sleeping partner.

Words near sleeping partners in the dictionary

  1. sleeping out
  2. sleeping over
  3. sleeping pad
  4. sleeping pads
  5. sleeping partner
  6. sleeping partners
  7. sleeping pill
  8. sleeping pills
  9. sleeping policeman
  10. sleeping policemen
  11. sleeping power

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sleeping partners (page history and authors); sleeping partner (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: “sleeping partners.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sleeping_partners. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.