Meaning
With complete, conspicuous success; triumphantly. It is the standard way of saying that someone passed a test, examination, or ordeal not merely adequately but brilliantly, and it is widely used of emphatic wins in sport, business, and politics. Follow it naturally with verbs like pass, come off, or come through. Beware glossing it as an ancient byword for resounding victory: pre-1800 uses often meant escaping defeat with honour. Regional use: General English.
Origin
Colours are a ship's or regiment's flags; a beaten commander struck or lowered them, so returning with colours still flying signalled an honourable outcome. The popular story that the phrase is purely naval is, however, incomplete: the earliest dated English evidence involves armies. John Speed's 1612 atlas describes Philip's army sent into Ireland with flying colours; the first clearly figurative use is William Ames's 1622 polemic, in which a bishop comes forth upon this piece of service with flying colours; John Locke's 1692 Third Letter for Toleration has a man brought off with flying colours in an argument he was losing; and Farquhar's 1707 comedy The Beaux Stratagem, whose heroes come off with flying colours, helped fix the expression. Wordorigins.org argues the early sense was avoiding a heavy defeat rather than outright triumph, and that the modern resounding-success sense only settled in the nineteenth century; the traditional naval-victory gloss found in the older reference books is the received story rather than the documented whole.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- come off with flying colours
- pass with flying colours
- with flying colors
Usage Examples
- She sat the bar exam in June and passed with flying colours, scoring in the top five percent nationwide.
- The young pilot came through his first solo flight with flying colours, setting down smoothly in a gusting crosswind.
- Critics expected the merger to fail, but the new chief executive emerged from it with flying colours.