fortune
Americannoun
-
fortunes
plural
-
position in life as determined by wealth.
It's not easy to make one's fortune from humble beginnings.
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wealth or riches.
He lost a small fortune in bad investments.
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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:
This involved the oligarch's huge business fortune - more than $10bn - held by a company called Electus Investments in Cyprus.
From BBC ● Oct. 12, 2026
Roman Abramovich's lawyers said he denies that he evaded tax or concealed his fortune.
From BBC ● Oct. 12, 2026
Adjusted for inflation, his fortune would be worth $30.4 billion today.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 9, 2026
Many of the nation’s largest retailers are struggling through similar automation transitions as pressure grows to boost sales and ship merchandise to homes faster without spending a fortune on additional workers or facilities.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 9, 2026
Lately she slept until after I left for the mines, but I was so excited, I wanted to wake her and show her our fortune.
From "Rump: The (Fairly) True Story of Rumpelstilskin" by Liesl Shurtliff
The revision to forecasts shows how much ASML’s fortunes have come to benefit from the buildout of data centers that turned chips into a red-hot commodity.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 14, 2026
"Love it, hate it, or fear it, AI is here, rapidly becoming a key driver of countries' relative fortunes in the world economy," said Georgieva last week.
From Barron's ● Oct. 11, 2026
The industrialists of the 19th and 20th centuries made their fortunes on new markets like oil, steel and railroads.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 9, 2026
In his two-decade career, Deol’s fortunes have ebbed and flowed.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 7, 2026
Toward the end of the meal, my father, turning to me as though peace had brought with it some great change to our meager fortunes, said, “Well, Louise, what will you do now?”
From "Jacob Have I Loved" by Katherine Paterson
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
Montrose had almost famished, but that he fortuned in his misery to light upon a small cottage in that wilderness, where he was supplied with some milk and bread.'
From Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems by W. E. (William Edmondstoune) Aytoun
It fortuned also vnder the gouernment of the foresayde Master Boppo, that one Syr Martine a Golin beeing accompanied with another knight, went into the countrey to see howe the Prussians were imployed.
From The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation — Volume 05 Central and Southern Europe by Richard Hakluyt
It fortuned after on a day that he gave battle to the same king of Egypt, wherein he was grievously wounded; nevertheless, he obtained the victory, notwithstanding he had his deadly wound.
From Mediaeval Tales by Henry Morley
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.
