Word.ws English Dictionary

friends in high places

friends in high places noun: friends who have authority or influence and who can ensure that one's interests will be protected or furthered.

Noun

friends in high places pl (plural only)

  1. (idiomatic, plural, plural-only) Friends who have authority or influence and who can ensure that one's interests will be protected or furthered.
    • "Herr Freudenberg himself has great friends here, friends in high places. He will see that nothing happens."1913, E. Phillips Oppenheim, chapter 10, in The Mischief Maker
    • In recent years he was protected by friends in high places.1987 November 30, “War Crimes: Long Road To Justice”, in Time, retrieved 18 May 2015

Examples of friends in high places in a sentence

  • We need friends in high places, so to speak.2000 June 17, Elizabeth A. Johnson, “Mary of Nazareth: Friend of God and Prophet”, in America, volume 182, number 21:
  • In Petrograd they were in great danger but had many friends in high places, and with money for bribes they avoided arrest.2006 April 1, Phillip Alder, “On a Day Made for Tricks, Lots of Ways to Get Them All”, in New York Times, retrieved 18 May 2015:
  • I walk into the corner of my room / See my friends in high places / I don't know which is which or who is whom / They've stolen each other's faces2008, “More News From Nowhere”, in Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, performed by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds:

Antonyms of friends in high places

Questions about friends in high places

What does friends in high places mean?
Friends in high places means friends who have authority or influence and who can ensure that one's interests will be protected or furthered.
How do you use friends in high places in a sentence?
We need friends in high places, so to speak.
What part of speech is friends in high places?
Friends in high places is a noun.

Words near friends in high places in the dictionary

  1. friendo
  2. friendom
  3. friendos
  4. friends
  5. friends at court
  6. friends in high places
  7. friends in higher places
  8. friends in low places
  9. friends list
  10. friends lists
  11. friends of Bill

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: friends in high places (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-friends in high places.ogg.

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