Word.ws English Dictionary

hit the high notes

hit the high notes verb: to produce or attain, at least for a period of time, an especially satisfactory degree of achievement or fulfilment.

Verb

hit the high notes (third-person singular simple present hits the high notes, present participle hitting the high notes, simple past and past participle hit the high notes)

  1. (idiomatic) To produce or attain, at least for a period of time, an especially satisfactory degree of achievement or fulfilment.
    • The flavors of the food hit the high notes: the rightly famous Canlis salad, the signature Peter Canlis sweet prawns floating on a sea of butter, and a succulent Kobe-style steak.2008 April 24, Leslie Kelly, “Sound and bites pair well at these places”, in Seattle Post-Intelligencer, retrieved 16 Nov 2017
    • If all that extra money isn't being used to shore up vital day-to-day Facebook operations, that's probably good news—but whatever the case, the site hasn't hit the high notes quite yet.2009 September 16, Bobbie Johnson, “How exactly is Facebook making money?”, in Guardian, UK, retrieved 16 Nov 2017

Forms of hit the high notes

third-person singular presenthits the high notes
present participlehitting the high notes
past participlehit the high notes
pasthit the high notes

Questions about hit the high notes

What does hit the high notes mean?
Hit the high notes means to produce or attain, at least for a period of time, an especially satisfactory degree of achievement or fulfilment.
What part of speech is hit the high notes?
Hit the high notes is a verb.
What is the past tense of hit the high notes?
The past tense of hit the high notes is hit the high notes.

Words near hit the high notes in the dictionary

  1. hit the ground running
  2. hit the gym
  3. hit the hay
  4. hit the head
  5. hit the headlines
  6. hit the high notes
  7. hit the jackpot
  8. hit the mark
  9. hit the nail on the head
  10. hit the net
  11. hit the pan

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hit the high notes (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-hit the high notes.ogg.

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