Meaning
A small sum of money for incidental personal spending. Historically it meant an allowance a husband gave his wife for her own purchases, a sense now dated and apt to sound condescending; today it usually denotes modest earnings, as from a hobby or spare-time work, with a hint that the amount is trivial. Dated and mildly dismissive when applied to a wife's allowance; casual and self-deprecating otherwise. Regional use: General English.
Origin
Pins were a costly necessity of 16th-century dress, and the custom of earmarking money for a woman's pins is real: a 1542 York will in the Testamenta Eboracensia leaves a daughter a church lease 'to by her pynnes withal', which The Phrase Finder treats as the earliest allusion. The compound itself is recorded later in the 17th century - Merriam-Webster dates it to 1674 - and an early cited use already concerns a marriage settlement of 200 pounds a year 'pin-mony' payable on separation, showing that by then it meant a wife's allowance rather than literally money for pins. The shift from that specific allowance to any small income, as of children or the low-paid, was complete by the 19th and 20th centuries. The pin-buying origin is thus documented custom, not a retrofitted story, though the phrase outgrew it quickly.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a little pin money
- pocket money
- spending money
Usage Examples
- She translated a few pages of subtitles each week, not a career, just pin money for cinema tickets.
- A curate's wife in the 1890s might have fifteen pounds a year of pin money of her very own, which shows how little married women could call their own.
- He insists the market stall brings in pin money, though it quietly pays the electricity bill.