head and shoulders above

1. 1.

   outstandingly superior to

   “in intelligence he was head and shoulders above the others in his class”

Questions about head and shoulders above

What does head and shoulders above mean?

head and shoulders above means "outstandingly superior to".

Is head and shoulders above a common word?

head and shoulders above 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.