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income

noun

Simple meaning

Money one earns by working or by capitalising on the work of others.

Pronunciation

Say it like this:

inkuhm

Say the bold part a little louder.

US device voice
IPA pronunciation (US)

ˈɪnkəm

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.

Word Review

Definition

Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.

noun

  1. Money one earns by working or by capitalising on the work of others.

  2. businesscommerce

    Money coming in to a fund, account, or policy.

  3. That which is taken into the body as food; the ingesta; sometimes restricted to the nutritive, or digestible, portion of the food.

Word at a Glance

Difficulty
A1 · Beginner
Frequency
Very Common
Typical Use
Everyday English

Word Aura™

How this word commonly comes across.

Aura for this meaning

This meaning: Money one earns by working or by capitalising on the work of others.

Used this way, income is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.

Emotional tone
Neutral
Formality
Neutral
Intensity
Not strongly marked
How common
Moderately common
Connotation
Matter-of-fact
Usage feel
Neutral and straightforward

Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.

More ways to use income

  • “His monthly income allows him to comfortably pay all his bills.”noun

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Common Patterns and Combinations

How this word naturally appears with others.

income taxnet incometaxable incomeincome statementincome distributionpersonal incomefamily incomefederal income

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Word Family

Related forms, grouped by how they connect.

Inflected forms

Grammatical variations of the same word.

  • incomingadjectiveInflected form

    Arriving at a place or position.

Compound terms

Established multiword terms.

  • income tax bracketnounCompound term

    A category of taxpayers based on the amount of their income.

  • income taxnounCompound term

    A personal tax levied on annual income.

  • income statementnounCompound term

    A financial statement that gives operating results for a specific period.

  • income bracketnounCompound term

    A category of taxpayers based on the amount of their income.

  • income tax returnnounCompound term

    Document giving the tax collector information about the taxpayer's tax liability.

  • government incomenounCompound term

    Income available to the government.

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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.