highflier

highfliernoun/haɪˈflaɪə(ɹ)/

• 1

  A person who or a type of aircraft that flies at high elevations.

• 2

  An ambitious person, especially one who takes risks or has an extravagant lifestyle.

  • under the appellations of Tory, Jacobite, highflier, and other cant words
  • 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 are a beating heart of London’s future!”
• 3

  fishinghobbieslifestyleA vertical pole used in commercial fishing to locate the beginning and end of a long fishing line.

• 4

  businessfinanceA 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.
  • 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.
• 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!
  • 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, […]
• 6

  obsoleteslangA 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.