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hotshot

adjectivenounverbattested in dialogue

  • //ˈhɒtˌʃɒt//

Highly skilled.

adjective

  1. 1

    informalHighly skilled.

    He was a hotshot lawyer, with an astounding win-loss record.

  2. 2

    informalDisplaying talent.

    Keep up those hotshot baskets, and the scouts are sure to take notice.

Etymology

From hot + shot.

noun

  1. 1

    informalSomeone with exceptional skills in a certain field.

    She sure was a hotshot on the keyboard, 93 words per minute!

    Heading into 2016 and 2020, if you told the hotshots from Obamaworld that you thought Biden would be a good candidate, they would uniformly offer a look of infinite patience, tolerance and condescension and say something like, “Well, I could understand how someone would think that.”

  2. 2

    A type of firefighter highly skilled in wildfire firefighting without external support, using basic tools that are backpacked in and manhandled about.

  3. 3

    A portable device that is used to jump-start an automobile battery, or the electrical output of such a device.

  4. 4

    A fast freight train.

    Indeed, development proceeded so rapidly thereafter that Mopac, for instance, was rebuilding a series of 10-year-old Woodard 2-8-4's into 4-8-4's by 1940 - not because they couldn't steam but because their 63-inch drivers couldn't roll the hotshots fast enough.

  5. 5

    slangA dose of recreational drugs deliberately laced with poison.

    I sniffed glue, transmission fluid, gasoline, whatever drug anybody gave me, I took. […] [Y]ears ago, I was in a drug rehabilitation program and found out that my brother was killed after somebody gave him a hotshot, drugs laced with poison.

  6. 6

    A lethal injection of heroin or another opiate.

    “You guys are being babies.” “Babies.” “Oh, we're being babies, Mac? Why don't you go work for your dad all day?” “My dad's a meth dealer.” “[Mock Crying] Oh, oh, no! My daddy's in prison!” “My daddy used to give hot shots to prostitutes. Feel sorry for me!”

verb

  1. 1

    slangTo give (somebody) a dose of recreational drugs deliberately laced with poison.

Forms

plural
hotshots
comparative
more hotshot
superlative
most hotshot
past tense
hotshotted
past participle
hotshotted
present participle
hotshotting
third person singular
hotshots
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).