earnings
Americannoun
plural noun
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money or other payment earned
-
the profits of an enterprise
Etymology
Origin of earnings
before 1050; Middle English erning, Old English earning, earnung merit, pay. See earn 1, -ing 1, -s 3
Explanation
Earnings are the amount of money you make from doing a job. You'll be a lot more excited about babysitting when you learn your earnings will be more than generous. Most earnings come from work that you've done, although money you earn from an investment can also be called earnings. Any financial profit or gain you make go into the earnings category, since you earn that money, whether through work, luck, or intelligence. The Proto-Germanic root, *aznon, means "do harvest work."
Vocabulary lists containing earnings
One Idea, Part 1
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Century 21 Accounting, 9e, Chapters 11-14
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Meanwhile, the Truist team observes that tech’s forward earnings growth remains by far the strongest in the market, with estimates rising approximately 20% over just the past three months.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 18, 2026
To increase Meta’s earnings per share by roughly 20%, Oppenheimer estimated that the company would have to gather 115 million Muse subscribers paying $20 a month—about double the number of paying subscribers of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 18, 2026
It is indeed the case that stocks on average perform poorly as interest rates are rising, as the present value of their futures earnings is discounted at higher and higher rates.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 18, 2026
The move could offer improved earnings from a more diversified energy portfolio, the analysts say.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 18, 2026
When a company puts out its earnings, one of the first things it does is hand it to the wires—Reuters, Dow Jones, and Bloomberg—for distribution.
From "The World Is Flat" by Thomas L. Friedman
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
