golden goose
9
4.4
- noun
- /ˈɡoʊldən ɡuːs/
- Informal
:
ganso de oro
- That little guy is the golden goose.
- kill the golden goose
- want a golden goose
Listen, nobody wants to kill the golden goose.
- Listen, nobody wants to kill the golden goose.
- These are the bosses who are often the proverbial golden goose.
- David Haye was the, the big boy, the golden goose, the pay-per-view star, the guy who's world champion and sort of we will have to work around him a little bit.
- And quite often the reason is the golden goose.
Examples
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But liberal policies are killing the golden goose, and businesses are leaving the country.
Blog text (15) -
It's all the software and the big golden goose is the data.
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It's coming, this golden goose, like Google was for five years.
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That will destroy our golden goose.
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You already got the golden goose.
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I want a golden goose.
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You lost your golden goose.
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In the 1990s, they basically had a golden goose.
Blog text (1) -
The golden goose is still laying.
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The innovative tech startup became a golden goose for investors, generating enormous profits each quarter.
Synonyms
18
3.8
A business or product that gives steady high income with little work
8
4.1
A project or business that earns a lot of money regularly
A business or product that makes a lot of money
How Profitable
Surface Forms
Morphology
golden + goose
A learner who knows 'golden' (very valuable) and 'goose' (a bird) can guess that this refers to a valuable or special goose, so there is some compositional cue. However, the specific sense ‘a continual source of profit’ depends on knowledge of the fable about a goose that lays golden eggs and is not directly predictable from the constituents alone, so full understanding requires cultural/idiomatic knowledge.
Etymology
Golden goose comes from an old story about a goose that laid golden eggs. One popular story says the owner killed the goose to get all the gold at once and lost his steady source of money, so today golden goose means a person or thing that 'keeps bringing in money'.