hotshot
hotshot Lexical Profile
hotshot Game Scores & Validity
• adjective
Exceptionally skilled, successful, or showily impressive, often with a suggestion of brashness or arrogance.
"The firm hired a hotshot attorney from Chicago to lead the complex corporate merger."
• noun
An exceptionally skilled, successful, or ambitious person, often one who is flamboyant or overly confident.
"The new sales director is a young hotshot who broke every regional record in her first quarter."
American A member of an elite, highly trained firefighting crew specializing in suppressing the most dangerous and remote parts of wildfires on foot.
"A team of twenty hotshots was deployed to cut a containment line along the steep mountain ridge."
North American A fast, high-priority train, especially a freight train running on an expedited schedule with few or no intermediate stops.
"The local freight train pulled onto a siding to let the transcontinental hotshot pass through at full speed."
• Rhymes for hotshot
Word Origin & Etymology
Originating in early 20th-century American slang, the term combines 'hot' (meaning impressive or exciting) and 'shot' (as in 'big shot', referring to an important or skilled person), and was later adopted by the U.S. Forest Service in the 1940s to designate elite wildfire-fighting crews.