slush fund
noun
Simple meaning
Money stored for illegal or dishonest purposes.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
sluhshfuhndSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈslʌʃˈfʌnd
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
finance
Money stored for illegal or dishonest purposes.
accounting
Money that has not been hypothecated or dedicated to a particular purpose, or which is used for a different purpose than originally intended.
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: Money stored for illegal or dishonest purposes.
Used this way, slush fund is a specialist word with a clearly unfavourable pull. This is a financial use: it has a settled meaning in accounting and business, where precision matters more than colour.
- Emotional tone
- Negative
- Formality
- Specialist/technical
- Intensity
- Moderate
- How common
- Specialized
- Connotation
- Deceptive or misleading
- Usage feel
- Clinical and detached
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.