"cold hard cash" meaning in English

See cold hard cash in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Audio: en-au-cold hard cash.ogg
Head templates: {{en-noun|-}} cold hard cash (uncountable)
  1. (idiomatic) Money, regarded as an incentive that can override any doubts or ethical concerns. Tags: idiomatic, uncountable Synonyms: cold cash, hard cash
    Sense id: en-cold_hard_cash-en-noun-en:any_money
  2. (idiomatic) Money in the form of banknotes and coins as opposed to electronic money, credit, and checks. Tags: idiomatic, uncountable Synonyms: cold cash, hard cash
    Sense id: en-cold_hard_cash-en-noun-en:banknotes_and_coins
  3. (idiomatic) Ready money. Tags: idiomatic, uncountable Synonyms: cold cash, hard cash
    Sense id: en-cold_hard_cash-en-noun-en:ready_money Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 7 11 79 2 Disambiguation of Pages with 1 entry: 7 7 81 4 Disambiguation of Pages with entries: 11 12 74 4
  4. (idiomatic, archaic) Money in the form of specie, as contrasted with paper money. Tags: archaic, idiomatic, uncountable Synonyms: cold cash, hard cash
    Sense id: en-cold_hard_cash-en-noun-en:specie__coinage
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        "Money, regarded as an incentive that can override any doubts or ethical concerns."
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        "(idiomatic) Money, regarded as an incentive that can override any doubts or ethical concerns."
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      "synonyms": [
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          "text": "The locals laughed when asked about forms of payment at the barber shop. \"No credit cards, no checks — just cold hard cash!\"",
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        "(idiomatic) Money in the form of banknotes and coins as opposed to electronic money, credit, and checks."
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        "Ready money."
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          "text": "As the war dragged on, greybacks became difficult to spend, as many sellers were taking only cold hard cash.",
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        }
      ],
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        "Money in the form of specie, as contrasted with paper money."
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-02-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-01-01 using wiktextract (f492ef9 and 9905b1f). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.