licence to print money
Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.
Meaning · English
A very profitable business or activity
Nghĩa · Tiếng Việt
một doanh nghiệp hoặc hoạt động rất có lợi nhuận
Machine-translated — suggest a fix
Literally: permission to produce currency
Where it’s used:
Used
Widespread English
Examples
Franchising isn't a licence to print money.
Now when we were privatized, there were those I'm sure who thought, It's a licence to print money.
British National Corpus sentence via the MAGPIE corpus (CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)
Sources & notes
Listed in Wiktionary’s “English idioms” category (retrieved 2026-07-29); definition pending editorial review. Definition drafted by AI (@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast) and auto-approved by rule on 2026-07-31; pending editor spot-check.
Common questions
What does “licence to print money” mean?
A very profitable business or activity Literally: permission to produce currency
Is “licence to print money” formal or informal?
No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.