money for old rope
- idiom
- Archaic
:
dinero fácil
- All this is money for old rope and done solely for greed.
Examples
-
Selling those old books online was just money for old rope; I hardly did any work.
-
He made a quick profit on the sale, calling it money for old rope since it took no time at all.
-
The project was so simple that completing it felt like money for old rope.
Synonyms
9
5.3
Money made quickly, often with little work or by dishonest ways
8
3.2
Money someone earns with little work
3
7.9
Money earned quickly, often by dishonest or easy ways
Easy extra pay for very little work
How Easy
- UK
- Informal
8
3.2
- Archaic
- UK
Surface Forms
Morphology
The idiomatic meaning 'easy profit' is not transparently built from the literal parts; a B1 learner who knows 'money', 'for', 'old' and 'rope' would most likely interpret it as payment for rope rather than the figurative sense. This is a chiefly British idiom whose intended sense requires cultural/lexicalized knowledge rather than compositional inference, so learners cannot reliably derive it from the constituents.
Etymology
The phrase money for old rope may come from rope makers who would buy old rope cheaply and make it into new rope to sell, so they earned money with almost no work. That's why the phrase means 'money earned with little or no effort'.