a share or amount taken or received illicitly, as in connection with a public enterprise.
a share, as of profits.
a discount in the price of a commodity.
We got a 20 percent rake-off on the dishwasher.
1885–90, noun use of verb phrase rake off
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
But the men with no fingerprints won’t permit it, those athletic directors and presidents who have subverted college athletics into a rake-off while pretending to govern them.
From Washington Post • Feb. 21, 2019
Though most officers are dissatisfied with this explanation, few, if any, believe that there is any rake-off at the top.
From Time Magazine Archive
Theatre treasurers, as well as a number of managers, receive from the agencies a rake-off of anywhere from 25� to $2 a ticket for preferred locations.
From Time Magazine Archive
The divine detectives who arrest Joseph K. are brassy louts who eat his breakfast, try to get a rake-off by sending out for his food, try to make off with his shirt and underwear.
From Time Magazine Archive
But Kloon had turned a deaf ear to his suggestions, — Kloon, who never entertained ambitions beyond his hootch rake-off, — whose miserable imagination stopped at a wretched percentage, satisfied.
From The Flaming Jewel by Chambers, Robert W. (Robert William)
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.
