unearned income
noun
Simple meaning
Personal income that you did not earn.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
uhnurndinkuhmSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
əˈnɝnˈdɪnkəm
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
taxation
Personal income that you did not earn (e.g., dividends or interest or rent income)
taxation
Income that is not a wage, such as interest, dividends or realized capital gains from investments, rent from land or property ownership, and any other income that does not derive from work.
taxationaccounting
Income received but not yet earned (usually considered a current liability on a company's balance sheet)
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
This meaning: Personal income that you did not earn (e.g., dividends or interest or rent income)
Used this way, unearned income 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
- Technical/specialist writing
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.