highflier

Noun

highflier (plural highfliers)

1. A person who or a type of aircraft that flies at high elevations.
2. (figuratively) An ambitious person, especially one who takes risks or has an extravagant lifestyle.
   • under the appellations of Tory, Jacobite, highflier, and other cant wordsc. 1711, Jonathan Swift, Some Remarks Upon A Pamphlet, Entitl'd, A Letter To The Seven Lords Of The Committee, Appointed To Examine Gregg
   • 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...2014 September 25, Hugo Macdonald, “Could those utopian hoardings for new developments get any more nauseating?”, in The Guardian, →ISSN
3. A vertical pole used in commercial fishing to locate the beginning and end of a long fishing line.
4. 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.2003, Larry Williams, The Right Stock at the Right Time, page 93
   • 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.2008, George Angell, Small Stocks for Big Profits
5. 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!1871, The Contemporary Review, volume 18, page 392
   • 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, […]1980, Journal of Meteorology, volume 5, page 9
6. (UK, obsolete, slang) A writer of begging letters.
7. 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.1919, Stanley J. Weyman, “VI. Field and Forge”, in The Great House