to land on one's feet
12
3.7
- idiom
- Informal
:
salir adelante
- After losing her job, she quickly found a new position and landed on her feet.
- always land on your feet
- land on your feet somehow
- manages to land on his feet
Examples
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I'm sure Singletary is doing fine somewhere, and Nolan has landed on his feet in Atlanta.
Blog text (17) -
JAN: Yeah, it seems like Carlos is the only one who landed on his feet with the oil tycoon.
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Okay, you always land on your feet.
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I could always tell in high school, um, that you were gonna land on your feet.
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You can come back and land on your feet.
Academic text (2009) -
His job had gotten up and run away from him, but it looked as if he might land on his feet after all.
Fiction book (1997) -
You're gonna land on your feet.
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Henson is probably going to land on his feet no matter what.
Blog text (34) -
Senator Kittner always lands on his feet.
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Ursula had been kicked hard in her life, even before her parents' divorce, but had learned to land on her feet and plot her own orbit; and she kept going because her course was fixed on a lodestar that drew her on.
Fiction book (1999)
Synonyms
27
3.7
To recover after illness, money problems, or other setbacks
To get better after a failure and start again
Antonyms
How Successful
241
3.2
- Informal
12
3.7
748
2.5
∞
3.2
121
3.1
466
3.2
Surface Forms
Morphology
The literal image ('to land on one's feet') is directly built from the known words and suggests a safe, successful physical outcome, so learners can guess a positive result. However, the shift from that literal image to the idiomatic sense of 'recovering from difficulty' is a metaphorical extension that is not fully predictable without exposure (though cross‑linguistic parallels make it somewhat inferable).
Etymology
Land on one's feet may come from the image of a cat or person falling and managing to land on their feet instead of getting hurt. That's why the phrase means 'to recover from a difficult situation and end up well'.