home and dry
1
5.8
- idiom
- Informal
:
a salvo
- After weeks of hard work, we finally completed the project and are now home and dry.
Examples
-
With the new funding approved, the startup is now home and dry for the next few years.
-
We are home and dry, my brother!
-
We're not home and dry just yet, though.
Blog text (20) -
We'll just zoom along here for a couple of hours, then we're home and dry.
-
They say if you can make it for seven, you're more or less home and dry.
Fiction book (1995) -
ONCE WE GET TO THAT AMPHIB, WE'RE HOME AND DRY.
-
Once they finished the last exam, the students felt home and dry, ready for summer break.
Synonyms
56
1.5
Not hurt and not in danger
2
3.5
A time when things move forward easily and without problems
1
2.8
Easy to do and without problems after it starts
Sure of success and relieved after finishing a hard task
Antonyms
How Safe
Surface Forms
Morphology
The constituents give partial clues—'home' suggests being back/safe and 'dry' suggests out of danger—but the combined idiomatic sense 'safely achieved success' is not fully predictable from the literal words. A B1 learner who knows 'home' and 'dry' might guess a sense of safety or completion but would likely need prior exposure to reach the precise meaning, so the expression is neither fully compositional nor fully opaque.
Etymology
Home and dry may come from old sailors. When a ship finally reached home and the cargo was still dry, the crew were safe, so the phrase came to mean 'having safely finished' or 'no longer at risk'.