fortune
Americannoun
-
fortunes
plural
-
position in life as determined by wealth.
It's not easy to make one's fortune from humble beginnings.
-
wealth or riches.
He lost a small fortune in bad investments.
-
great wealth; ample stock of money, property, and the like.
Those gems are worth a fortune.
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chance; luck.
They each had the bad fortune to marry the wrong person.
- Synonyms:
- karma, kismet, providence, destiny, fate
-
fortunes. things that happen or are to happen to a person in their life.
Her charitable spirit stayed with her even as her fortunes changed with marriage.
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fate; lot; destiny.
Whatever my fortune may be, my faith will guide me.
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Fortune. chance personified, commonly regarded as a mythical being distributing arbitrarily or capriciously the lots of life.
Perhaps Fortune will smile on our venture.
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good luck; success; prosperity.
The family was blessed by fortune.
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Archaic. a wealthy woman; an heiress.
verb (used with object)
verb (used without object)
idioms
noun
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an amount of wealth or material prosperity, esp, when unqualified, a great amount
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a large sum of money
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a power or force, often personalized, regarded as being responsible for human affairs; chance
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luck, esp when favourable
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(often plural) a person's lot or destiny
verb
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of fortune
First recorded in 1250–1300; Middle English, from Old French, from Latin fortūna “chance, luck, fortune,” derivative of fort- (stem of fors ) “chance”
Explanation
A fortune can be a large amount of money, and fortune is a form of fate. So you want to have the good fortune to make a fortune during your career. Fortuna was the Roman goddess of fate and luck. She was sometimes depicted with a wheel, and the random spinning of her "wheel of fortune" became a symbol for the unpredictability of fate (and, much later, the title of a popular game show). A fortune teller can look into her crystal ball or tarot cards and predict your future. But her predictions are probably about as accurate as the "prophecy" that comes inside your fortune cookie.
Vocabulary lists containing fortune
The SAT: Multiple-Meaning Words, List 7
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The New SAT: Multiple-Meaning Words
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"Macbeth" Vocabulary from Act III
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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.
See Examples For:
Julio Lobo had amassed a fortune in the sugar industry.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 6, 2026
Critics include some of California’s richest people, and they have spent a fortune in an effort to defeat it.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 31, 2026
He has had some luck, and some of his wins have turned on fortune - safety cars in Japan and Madrid, for example.
From BBC ● Oct. 27, 2026
Now at 69, his riches outstrip everyone on the continent, with a worth of $35.7 billion, according to the Bloomberg billionaires index, while Forbes estimates his fortune at $51.3 billion.
From Barron's ● Oct. 27, 2026
The Arctic expedition and the American rescue mission had cost a fortune.
From "American Spirits" by Barb Rosenstock
Its fortunes have waned over the years, and in 2023 it was sold to a performance-marketing company, an all-too-common fate for many of the publications that once flourished online.
From Slate ● Nov. 6, 2026
The 10-brand group's declining fortunes in the world's largest car market are the main reason behind a historic restructuring drive that could see it shed up to 120,000 jobs by the end of the decade.
From Barron's ● Nov. 6, 2026
Stocks of companies whose fortunes are tightly coupled with the AI boom have been hammered over the past month.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 3, 2026
The club opted to stick with former Wolves and Tottenham Hotspur boss Nuno despite him being unable to turn around the club's fortunes.
From BBC ● Nov. 3, 2026
Some would go upstairs to Hazel’s mother to have their fortunes read or to buy charms from Marie Levesque, the famous gris- gris queen.
From "The Son of Neptune" by Rick Riordan
In May 2015, already a very successful MLM seller, Igor Alberts was invited to a OneCoin event in Dubai, where he met lots of people, all apparently making fortuned with this new currency.
From BBC ● Nov. 23, 2019
Alfred Milner was born 71 years ago, the son of a modestly fortuned country physician.
From Time Magazine Archive
For his shameful ende: fortuned for lacke of lore.
From The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 by Alexander Barclay
And it fortuned them to mete the husbande of the said gentyll woman and desyred hym of his iudgment, shewynge hym all the hole mater.
From Shakespeare Jest-Books Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed to Have Been Used by Shakespeare by William Carew Hazlitt
And it fortuned that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom: The rich man also died, and was buried.
From The first New Testament printed in English by
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