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Synonyms

make a fortune

Idioms  

  1. Also, make a small fortune. Earn a great deal of money, as in He made a fortune on the stock market. Similar expressions are, as in Now that their parents have died, they're worth a small fortune. Make a fortune dates from about 1700, and its use with small from the second half of the 1800s.

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.

Hua's wishes for the Year of the Horse were straightforward: "Of course, I hope to make a fortune, have a smooth life and stay healthy."

From Barron's • Feb. 13, 2026

It goes the other way, too: U.S. companies make a fortune selling software, financial products and oil across the Atlantic.

From The Wall Street Journal • Jan. 20, 2026

They were correctly betting that the winners would make a fortune.

From MarketWatch • Oct. 31, 2025

"A couple of times he'd said to me, 'You should do it, you'd make a fortune, but you don't have to if you don't want to do it. I make enough money,'" Sophie says.

From BBC • Feb. 6, 2023

That was the beauty of credit default swaps: They enabled him to make a fortune if just a tiny fraction of these dubious pools of mortgages went bad.

From "The Big Short" by Michael Lewis

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.