English · Word pair Candidate

high and dry

Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.

Sense 1

Both English Tiếng Việt

Meaning · English

Left in a difficult or precarious situation

Nghĩa · Tiếng Việt

Bị bỏ rơi trong tình huống khó khăn hoặc nguy hiểm

Machine-translated — suggest a fix

Literally: Stranded, like a ship on dry land

Where it’s used: Used Widespread English

Examples

Some of the locks were ready long before the canal which serves them, and were literally high and dry for a time.

Because the Troodos ophiolite has been uplifted and eroded, a slice through successive layers of oceanic crust has been exposed, high and dry on the main hillsides of Cyprus.

British National Corpus sentence via the MAGPIE corpus (CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)

Sources & notes

Listed on Wikipedia “Irreversible binomial” (CC BY-SA 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-29). Definition drafted by AI (@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast) and auto-approved by rule on 2026-07-30; pending editor spot-check.

Sense 2

Meaning · English

an epithet applied to the soi-disant "orthodox" clergy of the last century, for whom, while ill-paid curates did the work, the comforts of the Establishment were its greatest charms.

Era: ca. 1874 (Victorian)

Where it’s used: Origin British & Irish English

Sources & notes

Historical definition reproduced from Hotten’s The Slang Dictionary (1874, public domain; Project Gutenberg #42108, retrieved 2026-07-31). Reflects the attitudes of its era.

Equivalents & related

Near equivalent cao ráo (adjective) high and dry (generally speaking) Tiếng Việt

Topics: Historical slang (1800s)

Common questions

What does “high and dry” mean?

Left in a difficult or precarious situation Literally: Stranded, like a ship on dry land

Is “high and dry” formal or informal?

No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.

What is the closest equivalent?

“cao ráo” (Tiếng Việt) — near equivalent.