chief financial officer
noun
Simple meaning
The executive who is in charge of financial affairs, notably as head of a financial department.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
cheefuhnanshuhlawfuhserSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈtʃifənænʃəlɔfəsɚ
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
business
The executive who is in charge of financial affairs, notably as head of a financial department, typically directly under the chief executive officer and/or the board who lead the corporation or other organisation as a whole.
business
The corporate executive having financial authority to make appropriations and authorize expenditures for a firm
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
This meaning: The executive who is in charge of financial affairs, notably as head of a financial department, typically directly under the chief executive officer and/or the board who lead the corporation or other organisation as a whole.
Used this way, chief financial officer is a specialist word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. This is a financial use: it has a settled meaning in accounting and business, where precision matters more than colour.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Specialist/technical
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Specialized
- Connotation
- Clinical and technical
- Usage feel
- Technical and specialized
Where it naturally appears
- Finance/economics
- Business/professional
Usage note
In general conversation this sense usually needs explaining — outside its field, people reach for a plainer word.
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.