cash cow

noun

1

: a consistently profitable business, property, or product whose profits are used to finance a company's investments in other areas

2

: one regarded or exploited as a reliable source of money

a singer deemed a cash cow for the record label

Examples of cash cow in a Sentence

The football team was a cash cow for the university.

The movie studio saw the actress as a cash cow.

Recent Examples on the Web

The overall result was that Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, continued to use the Orinoco as a cash cow, doing little to maintain it, and so essentially ran a large part of it into the ground over the next decade. —Scott Montgomery, Forbes.com, 25 Jan. 2026

Introducing ads to ChatGPT could help OpenAI meet its ambitious spending commitments, as digital advertising has long been the cash cow for other big tech companies like Google and Meta. —Ashley Capoot, CNBC, 16 Jan. 2026

Hook, the bassist for New Order, served as a kind of player-coach at the Haçienda, helping manage its madcap affairs while his band became the club’s cash cow. —Boris Kachka, The Atlantic, 9 Jan. 2026

The writing was pure, yet every column was lined with flamboyantly tasteful advertisements; the magazine was a kind of literary cash cow. —Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 1 Dec. 2025

Word History

First Known Use

1972, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Rhymes for cash cow

• allow
• avow
• basedow
• chiao
• endow
• eyebrow
• highbrow
• lanao
• meow
• powwow
• somehow
• anyhow