fortune
Americannoun
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position in life as determined by wealth.
It's not easy to make one's fortune from humble beginnings.
-
wealth or riches.
He lost a small fortune in bad investments.
-
great wealth; ample stock of money, property, and the like.
Those gems are worth a fortune.
-
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.
-
Fortune. chance personified, commonly regarded as a mythical being distributing arbitrarily or capriciously the lots of life.
Perhaps Fortune will smile on our venture.
-
good luck; success; prosperity.
The family was blessed by fortune.
-
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
-
a large sum of money
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a power or force, often personalized, regarded as being responsible for human affairs; chance
-
luck, esp when favourable
-
(often plural) a person's lot or destiny
verb
Other Word Forms
- fortuneless adjective
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”
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.
Consultants are making a fortune evangelizing these terms.
The psychiatrist had made a fortune as a commodities trader in the 1980s and 1990s.
A change of fortunes on Tuesday overnight with the cloudier skies over southeastern parts of the UK.
From BBC
It is still possible, of course, that Labour manages to sort itself out and improve its fortunes, though of course the events of the last 48 hours make that harder to see.
From BBC
For instance, in 2009, Stern apparently describes a Beijing dinner at the house of a friend who made a "fortune in steel".
From BBC
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.
