flying colors

1. 1.

   complete success

   “they passed inspection with flying colors”

   Synonymsflying colours

   Broadersuccess

   plural

Questions about flying colors

What does flying colors mean?

flying colors means "complete success".

What is another word for flying colors?

Close synonyms include flying colours. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is flying colors a common word?

flying colors 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.