Meaning
No matter what obstacles, disasters or difficulties may arise. Used to state that something will be done or will happen regardless of any opposition, come what may, and it expresses firm, sometimes defiant determination. Informal and forceful; determined, sometimes stubborn or defiant in tone. Regional use: General English; American in origin.
Origin
An American expression whose derivation, as The Phrase Finder puts it, is not well understood and does not allude to any particular event or episode; that site's best guess is simply that it is an impressive-sounding alliterative pairing of two obvious calamities, hell and flood. The earliest strong evidence is American: the Burlington Weekly Hawk Eye of Iowa reprinted in May 1882 a dialect piece about having had hell and high water that already treats it as an old saying, suggesting mid-nineteenth-century currency. The Oxford English Dictionary, cited by Grammarphobia, records the variant 'in spite of hell and high water' in congressional testimony of 1871 and its first example of the exact wording 'come hell or high water' from Agnes Newton Keith's 1939 memoir Land Below the Wind. The Phrase Finder notes the first citation outside the United States comes only in 1915.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- hell or high water
- in spite of hell and high water
- through hell and high water
Usage Examples
- Come hell or high water, the bakery will have its ovens running by Friday.
- She promised to attend the graduation, hell or high water, and she arrived despite the storm.
- We are finishing this trail come hell or high water, even if we have to walk the last miles in the dark.