Income from investments, property, or inheritance, as opposed to earned income or state benefit.
〈英〉私人收入（来自投资、财产或遗产的收入，与工资收入或国家福利相对）
old people with private means can choose such care
he is a man of private means
Example sentencesExamples
Can innovative private means of raising money help fund, in part or in total, future human missions to Mars?
Peacock had modest private means but earned his living as an official in the East India Company.
Rather, such programs should be funded fully by private means or by government vouchers.
Only those people with abundant private means, investment and/or property can truly be said to have a comfortable old age.
A 1903 committee pointed out that it was folly to expect to find young men who had both education and private means.
Before the war it was accepted that a composer would, unless he had private means, teach or choose a hard financial existence until his 40s or 50s.
Jane Austen is clearly concerned about the virtual captivity of women who unless they have private means must depend on marriage for financial support.
What comes through these biographies and recorded reactions in the press and magazine coverage of exhibitions is just how hard it must have been to sustain a meaningful position as an artist in Ireland, unless one had private means.
The book business remains ideally suited to those who have private means.
Persons of nobility too, who often lived off private means, were likely to spend more for religious purposes.
Setting pay so that politics as a career is opened up to men and women without private means is by all accounts a step towards greater democracy.
He inherited private means just sufficient to enable him to live as a man of letters.
The democratisation of cricket is now being driven on by the fact that the money in the game is sufficient for players without private means to be attracted to it and to become well-off from it.
Nonetheless, in 1921 Peche acquired a new patron, Wolko Gartenberg, who had private means and gave Peche full rein to design the living and dining rooms of his apartment in the center of Vienna.
This new funding represents a small fraction of the total resources directed at fighting homelessness when federal, state, local, and private means are taken into consideration.
He's an upper middle-class Cambridge educated poet of private means.
I also suspect that he had private means - i.e. he did not have to depend on his writing income to keep body and soul together.
This group includes care home residents who were paying their fees from private means on 31 March 1993 and who have subsequently run out of money.
The great inventors were always men of private means.
He used his private means to entertain well, but never ostentatiously.