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Definition of cash cow
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 Baseball still has a couple of weeks to get its act together and salvage a season, NBA teams now have their Disney World hotel assignments, and the football cash cow will be given every chance to keep producing.
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Mike Finger, ExpressNews.com, "Finger: As leagues struggle to return, nothing is simple," 16 June 2020 Several factors have propelled the Open Division question for basketball, the AIA's second biggest cash cow to football.
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Richard Obert, azcentral, "Players leaving for prep school heating up talk for Arizona high school basketball open division," 7 June 2020 And while the budget was tight, the hotels were intended to be as much as a cultural statement as a cash cow: sculptures were scattered inside and out, and there was contemporary Greek art on the walls.
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Mark Ellwood, Condé Nast Traveler, "How the Greek Government's Minimalist Hotels Turned the Islands into a Tourist Hotspot," 2 June 2020 Macau has been a cash cow for the Las Vegas giants and other casino players for almost two decades, generating more than five times the revenue of Las Vegas in 2018.
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Joyu Wang And Jing Yang, WSJ, "Coronavirus: Bad Luck Hits Macau Casinos With 15-Day Shutdown," 4 Feb. 2020 Up until a few years ago, the 777 line had been a major cash cow for Boeing Commercial Airplanes, which brings about 60% of the company's revenue.
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Dan Catchpole, Fortune, "Boeing earnings preview: Will its new CEO plot a course correction?," 28 Jan. 2020 This would otherwise be the cash cow of Rama Jama’s year.
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Michael Casagrande | Mcasagrande@al.com, al, "A new plan for Rama Jama’s and how ex-Alabama star helped eatery," 13 Apr. 2020 Football, of course, is the cash cow for most college programs.
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Tom Green | Tgreen@al.com, al, "Auburn AD Allen Greene optimistic, but impact of no football in 2020 must be discussed amid COVID-19," 23 Mar. 2020 Delany was instrumental in the development of the first conference-specific network, the Big Ten Network, which was once considered a pie-in-the-sky idea but has turned into an enormous cash cow for the league and its institutions.
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Zach Osterman, Indianapolis Star, "IU is first stop on new Big Ten commissioner's 14-college tour," 29 Jan. 2020
See MoreThese example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'cash cow.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
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Time Traveler for cash cow
The first known use of cash cow was in 1972
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