cash cow
18
3.8
- noun
- /kæʃ kaʊ/
:
vaca lechera
- The new smartphone has become a cash cow for the company, generating substantial profits each quarter.
- the biggest cash cow
- milk the cash cow
- become a cash cow
The danger though, is value added taxes are a cash cow.
- The danger though, is value added taxes are a cash cow.
- In the long run, we expect Tesla to be a big ol cash cow.
- It's like a very steady cash cow almost.
- But bottom line is you need to have a cash cow.
- And, and you'd be really, I mean, you definitely need a five year plan for your cash cow for your core business.
- What they were doing was self medicating this, their insomnia and they finally, rather than railing against it, they started to see it as a cash cow, rightly so.
- Maybe the long term business model of perplexity can make us profitable and a good company, but never as profitable in a cash cow as Google was.
- They helped kill their own cash cow because in the end, ideology was more important to them and the stank they created in their own newsroom remained.
- He goes on to say the most promising option I can think of, as I mentioned earlier, would be for Open AI to attach to Tesla as its cash cow.
- Then you become the cash cow, the apples of the world.
- Now I'm willing to, you know, I'm willing to, but these record labels have huge rosters with huge schedules and post is their biggest cash cow.
Examples
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They're terrified their cash cow will slip away.
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The industry has been a cash cow for NY state for generations.
Blog text (22) -
It's always on television and it's a cash cow for them.
-
Sam, this is a cash cow business here.
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We need to keep this cash cow alive.
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I hear Maps was one of the cash cows for Google.
Blog text (27) -
It's a major cash cow, Admiral.
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Microsoft has had a terrible track record on the web and has multiple cash cows to protect.
Blog text (10) -
For the research universities, the first two years of undergraduate education have become relative cash cows.
Academic text (2012) -
But what you really want to do is have money coming in from your cash cow, then you put it to work for you, and then that money then goes around and pays for your expenses.
Synonyms
18
3.9
A regular way that a business or organization earns money
9
4.4
A thing or business that keeps making a lot of money
8
4.1
A project or business that earns a lot of money regularly
3
4.1
A business or product that makes a lot of money easily
A business or product that makes a lot of money
A way to get easy regular money with little work
How Profitable
Surface Forms
Morphology
cash + cow
The phrase uses a fairly transparent metaphor: 'cow' as a steady producer (like a milk-yielding cow) combined with 'cash' yields the idea of something that reliably generates money. Similar metaphors exist in other languages (e.g. French 'vache à lait', Spanish 'vaca lechera'), so learners can often infer the business meaning, but the figurative/business-specific sense still requires some cultural or contextual knowledge and is not purely compositional.
Etymology
The phrase cash cow comes from the image of a healthy cow that keeps giving milk, which means steady cash with little work. That's why we call a business or product a cash cow when it brings a regular, easy 'income'.