plain sailing

1. 1.

   easy unobstructed progress

   “after we solved that problem the rest was plain sailing”

   Synonymsclear sailingeasy going

   Broaderprogress

Questions about plain sailing

What does plain sailing mean?

plain sailing means "easy unobstructed progress".

What is another word for plain sailing?

Close synonyms include clear sailing, easy going. 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 plain sailing a common word?

plain sailing 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.