high gear

Idioms

A state of maximum activity, energy, or force. For example, His mind was in high gear as he studied for the medical exam, or The political campaign is finally moving into high gear. This expression alludes to the high gear of an engine transmission, used at the fastest speeds.

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

More recently, Anthropic’s Mythos and other frontier artificial-intelligence models, capable of finding thousands of software bugs at machine speed, are putting find-and-fix strategies into high gear.

From The Wall Street Journal • Jun. 16, 2026

And as the primary’s final stretch nears, the campaigns are kicking into high gear.

From Los Angeles Times • May 17, 2026

“Apple’s innovation engine was in high gear this month with a flurry of new products unveiled across the Mac, iPhone, iPad, and AirPods families,” White wrote Thursday.

From Barron's • Mar. 26, 2026

The AI chatbot marketing wars are kicking into high gear as Anthropic, the startup behind Claude, takes aim at rival OpenAI in its Super Bowl advertising debut.

From The Wall Street Journal • Feb. 4, 2026

Yet by 1987, when the drug war hit high gear, the industrial employment of black men had plummeted to 28 percent.

From "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023