come a long way

Idioms

Make considerable progress or improvement, as in That's good, Rob—you've certainly come a long way. This usage, which transfers the “distance” of a long way to progress, gained considerable currency in the 1960s and 1970s in an advertising slogan for Virginia Slims cigarettes addressed especially to women: “You've come a long way, baby.”

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.

The third holds that we’ve come a long way in ridding ourselves of racism—particularly of the institutional kind—but stops short of declaring the bogeyman dead.

From The Wall Street Journal

The chef has come a long way since he arrived in London after an arduous journey from Damascus with virtually no money in his pocket.

From Barron's

Katie Holmes, who has come a long way since her days on “Dawson‘s Creek,” is the latest to take on the Hedda challenge.

From Los Angeles Times

“We have come a long way in the last 10,000 years,” Mr. Ennos writes, though people are “using up stores of energy that had been captured by plants from sunlight over millions of years.”

From The Wall Street Journal

At the Tuesday West Palm Beach event focused on defense tech, Omeed Malik, president of 1789 Capital, which opted not to invest in Anthropic, joked that the tech industry has come a long way in embracing defense.

From The Wall Street Journal

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