Hell-for-leather

adv

adv ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adverb
  1. 1
    As fast as possible; recklessly fast. not-comparable

    "He rode hell-for-leather to catch up with the stagecoach."

Adverb
  1. 1
    extremely fast wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
expeditiouslyhell-bent for leatherlike a bat out of hellquickly

Example

More examples

"He rode hell-for-leather to catch up with the stagecoach."

Etymology

Earliest reference is from 1889 in "The Gadsbys" by Rudyard Kipling, referring to the effect on the leather of a saddle (or perhaps a crop) of riding a horse as fast as possible.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.