bid fair

English

Verb

bid fair (third-person singular simple present bids fair, present participle bidding fair, simple past bade fair, past participle bidden fair)

1. (usually followed by "to") To have a reasonable claim; to seem likely.
   • 1828, Peter Miller Cunningham, Two Years in New South Wales, page 52:

     A number of the phrases current in St. Giles's Greek bid fair to become legitimatised in the dictionary of this colony: plant, swag, pulling up, and other epithets of the Tom and Jerry school, are established — […]

   • 2009, Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Penguin, published 2010, page 632:

     Yet this English experimentation abruptly ended when Edward, after a healthy and assertive childhood in which he bade fair to be as over-lifesize as his formidable father, died young in 1553.