well-heeled

English

Etymology

Originally American English, from a literal use in cockfighting: a well-heeled cock was provided with sharp spurs and could inflict maximum damage. From this developed the American frontier slang sense of being well-equipped, and thence the modern sense of being well supplied with money.

Adjective

well-heeled (comparative more well-heeled, superlative most well-heeled)

1. (colloquial) Rich, affluent, prosperous.
   • 2001, Salman Rushdie, Fury: A Novel, London: Jonathan Cape, →ISBN, page 4:

     On Professor Solanka’s street, well-heeled white youths lounged in baggy garments on roseate stoops, stylishly simulating indigence while they waited for the billionairedom that would surely be along sometime soon.

   • 2019 April 10, Adrian Higgins, “This florist started caring for ailing orchids on the side. He’s now babysitting 13,000.”, in The Washington Post‎:

     The world changes, consumerism marches on, and things once considered luxuries for the well-heeled are now taken for granted by us all — homes with 2½ bathrooms, air travel, cars with power windows.

   • 2021 July 25, Claire Armitstead, “Jeanette Winterson: ‘The male push is to discard the planet: all the boys are going off into space’”, in The Guardian‎:

     These public artworks only arrived a few weeks ago, Winterson explains, as part of a grand plan to pedestrianise the area, and make it more buzzy, just at the moment that the sort of well-heeled office workers who bought upmarket chocolates are abandoning it owing to the Covid pandemic.

   • 2023 February 22, “Stop & Examine”, in RAIL, number 977, page 71:

     Mum had worked there as a teenager and once recalled her duty of having to meet the charabancs that brought the well-heeled to the baths from Droitwich station before the war.

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