ill-gotten gains

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English

Etymology

Perhaps extracted from ill-gotten gains never prosper.

Noun

ill-gotten gains pl (plural only)

  1. Money or other property acquired dishonestly.
    Synonym: dirty money
    • 1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter XXXIX, in Vanity Fair , London: Bradbury and Evans , published 1848, →OCLC:
      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.
    • 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:
      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.
    • 1883, Howard Pyle, “Robin Hood and Will Scarlet”, in The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood , New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons , →OCLC:
      By the bright bow of Heaven, I will have their ill-gotten gains from them, even though I hang for it as high as e'er a forest tree in Sherwood!
    • 1903 September 26, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Empty House”, in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, New York, N.Y.: McClure, Phillips & Co., published February 1905, →OCLC:
      The exclusion from his clubs would mean ruin to Moran, who lived by his ill-gotten card gains.
    • 2015 February 6, Paul Sullivan, “Finding the ‘Right’ Way to Dispose of Ill-Gotten Gains”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:
      How, exactly, does a lawyer come to legally give away ill-gotten gains on behalf of an international company that does not want to be named and surely does not want to face prosecution for what one division did?

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