as the crow flies

1. 1.

   by the shortest and most direct route

   “it's 10 miles as the crow flies”

Questions about as the crow flies

What does as the crow flies mean?

as the crow flies means "by the shortest and most direct route".

Is as the crow flies a common word?

as the crow flies is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.