highflier

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See also: high-flier and high flier

English

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Pronunciation

Noun

highflier (plural highfliers)

  1. A person who or a type of aircraft that flies at high elevations.
  2. (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, →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!”
  3. (fishing) A vertical pole used in commercial fishing to locate the beginning and end of a long fishing line.
  4. (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.
  5. 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, […]
  6. (UK, slang, obsolete) A writer of begging letters.
  7. 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.

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