highflier
See also: high-flier and high flier
English
[edit]Alternative forms
[edit]Pronunciation
[edit]- IPA(key): /haɪˈflaɪə(ɹ)/
Audio (General Australian): (file)
Noun
[edit]highflier (plural highfliers)
- A person who or a type of aircraft that flies at high elevations.
- (figurative) An ambitious person, especially one who takes risks or has an extravagant lifestyle.
- c. 1711, Jonathan Swift, Some Remarks Upon A Pamphlet, Entitl'd, A Letter To The Seven Lords Of The Committee, Appointed To Examine Gregg:
- under the appellations of Tory, Jacobite, highflier, and other cant words
- 2014 September 25, Hugo Macdonald, “Could those utopian hoardings for new developments get any more nauseating?”, in The Guardian[1], →ISSN:
- A beautiful woman juggled expensive shopping bags while taking a call; friends gathered clinking glasses in celebration; a young man coyly slurped noodles; a gaggle of suited highfliers shook hands over a boardroom with views across the city. Everything screamed: “We are no longer in recession! We are a beating heart of London’s future!”
- (fishing) A vertical pole used in commercial fishing to locate the beginning and end of a long fishing line.
- (finance) A glamorous stock that potentially offers high returns to investors.
- 2003, Larry Williams, The Right Stock at the Right Time, page 93:
- Virtually all highfliers that I have seen over all these years of trading have crumbled at some point.
- 2008, George Angell, Small Stocks for Big Profits:
- I like Canadian stocks and have done quite well investing in them, but you are typically better off buying a stock on the Toronto Stock Exchange, Canada's leading exchange, than some of the highfliers in Vancouver.
- A swingboat.
- 1871, The Contemporary Review, volume 18, page 392:
- […] and high-flyer boat-swings, full of half-drunken men and half-mad, screaming girls, swing up to perilous heights, and all but whirl over, as if to shoot out the whole of their frantic cargoes!
- 1980, Journal of Meteorology, volume 5, page 9:
- A small copper-plate representation of Frost Fair […] Among the activities shown are Letterpress Printing, Copperplate Printing, a Sheep to be roasted, Ballad Singers, Swinging (in boat-shaped swings called the 'high Flyer'), playing at Skittles, […]
- (UK, slang, obsolete) A writer of begging letters.
- A type of phaeton carriage.
- 1919, Stanley J. Weyman, “VI. Field and Forge”, in The Great House:
- The emotions of those who journeyed for the first time on a railway at a speed four times as great as that of the swiftest High-flier that ever devoured the road are forgotten by this generation.
Related terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]figurative: an ambitious person
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