“Ill gotten gains” means money or property obtained in a dishonest, illegal, or unfair way. People often use it for profit from theft, fraud, bribery, corruption, or similar wrongdoing.
The phrase is old. In this expression, ill means badly or wrongly, not sick. Gotten is an old past participle of get. It still survives in some varieties of English and in set phrases like this one. So the phrase literally means gains that were wrongly obtained.
Today, it appears often in legal, political, and journalistic contexts, but native speakers also understand it in everyday use.
- The court ordered the company to surrender its ill gotten gains.
- He lived comfortably on ill gotten gains for years before investigators found the fraud.
Writers sometimes spell it ill gotten gains without a hyphen, but ill-gotten gains is very common in modern publishing. In either form, the meaning stays the same: benefits that should not have been acquired in the first place.
