Highflier

//haɪˈflaɪə(ɹ)// noun, slang

noun, slang ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A person who or a type of aircraft that flies at high elevations.
  2. 2
    a person of great ability and ambition wordnet
  3. 3
    An ambitious person, especially one who takes risks or has an extravagant lifestyle. figuratively

    "under the appellations of Tory, Jacobite, highflier, and other cant words"

  4. 4
    A vertical pole used in commercial fishing to locate the beginning and end of a long fishing line.
  5. 5
    A glamorous stock that potentially offers high returns to investors.

    "Virtually all highfliers that I have seen over all these years of trading have crumbled at some point."

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  1. 6
    A swingboat.

    "[…] 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!"

  2. 7
    A writer of begging letters. UK, obsolete, slang
  3. 8
    A type of phaeton carriage.

    "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."

Synonyms

All synonyms
highflyer

Example

More examples

"under the appellations of Tory, Jacobite, highflier, and other cant words"

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