Word.ws English Dictionary

ride high

ride high verb: to enjoy good fortune; to be in a privileged situation; to be particularly happy or proud.

Verb

ride high (third-person singular simple present rides high, present participle riding high, simple past and past participle rode high)

  1. (idiomatic) To enjoy good fortune; to be in a privileged situation; to be particularly happy or proud.
    • He that went away with his frock-skirts looped over his arm, comes back riding high; suddenly made one of the dignitaries of this world.1843 April, Thomas Carlyle, “ch. 9”, in Past and Present, American edition, Boston, Mass.: Charles C[offin] Little and James Brown, published 1843, →OCLC, (please specify |book=I or IV, or the page)
    • Many people suspect that scientists, riding high in the modern world, are uninterested in man's spiritual qualities, which cannot be subjected to test tube and microscopic analysis.1955 October 10, “Science: An Attribute of God”, in Time, retrieved 08 Jan 2018
  2. (idiomatic, slang) To perform the coital alignment technique.

Forms of ride high

third-person singular presentrides high
present participleriding high
past participlerode high
pastrode high

Origin of ride high

* Possibly an allusion to one who rides on horseback in an upright, proud, commanding manner.

Questions about ride high

What does ride high mean?
Ride high means to enjoy good fortune; to be in a privileged situation; to be particularly happy or proud.
What part of speech is ride high?
Ride high is a verb.
What is the past tense of ride high?
The past tense of ride high is rode high.

Words near ride high in the dictionary

  1. ride hard
  2. ride hard and put away wet
  3. ride height
  4. ride heights
  5. ride herd on
  6. ride high
  7. ride off
  8. ride off into the sunset
  9. ride on
  10. ride on a rail
  11. ride on the back of

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ride high (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-ride high.ogg.

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