This paper develops a new approach to the analysis of how households tend to diversify their spending: the approach is to measure empirically how widely their total spending is distributed across different expenditure categories. Based on UK spending data spanning over 50 years, our results suggest that the diversification of household expenditure patterns takes place in such a way that, as household income rises, total household expenditure is distributed across different goods in an increasingly even manner. Moreover, when examining how household diversification patterns changed over time, we find evidence that there has been acceleration in the rate at which household expenditure patterns become diversified as household income rises. This represents a fascinating result, given that income inequality increased by 10 percentage points in the UK during the same period (Atkins 1997).