Meaning
To receive or acquire a sum of money without having worked for it, most often through an inheritance, and sometimes through a legacy, windfall, or unexpected payout. Neutral in tone; it frames the money as arriving from outside the receiver's own efforts, which is why it so often appears in sentences about wills and surprise bequests. Neutral, everyday register; almost always implies money received rather than earned. Regional use: General English.
Origin
Built on the phrasal verb 'come into', which has a long legal sense defined by Webster's Third New International (1966) as 'to enter upon or in possession of: acquire esp. as an inheritance'; Collins today glosses 'come into money, property, or a title' simply as 'to inherit'. Middle English already used the construction for succeeding to thrones and estates, so the image of entering upon possession is medieval rather than modern. The money-specific collocation was thoroughly established in 19th-century fiction - Dickens's 'Little Dorrit' and 'Our Mutual Friend' both turn on characters who come into money unexpectedly - but no standard reference publishes a first-citation date for the exact wording. The honest position is that the inheritance sense of 'come into' is centuries older than the fixed money phrase, which was in ordinary use by the Victorian period; a precise birth year cannot be given without inventing one.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- came into money
- come into a fortune
- come into an inheritance
- come into property
- come into some money
Usage Examples
- When her aunt died, she came into enough money to pay off the mortgage.
- He denies coming into money suddenly; every pound, he says, was earned over thirty years.
- The villagers speculated for weeks about which of them would come into the old man's fortune.