on the side

1. 1.

   without official authorization

   “he had made some money on the side”

   Synonymsunofficially

Questions about on the side

What does on the side mean?

on the side means "without official authorization".

What is another word for on the side?

Close synonyms include unofficially. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is on the side a common word?

on the side is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.