Wiktionary
n. (leading light English)
Wikipedia
Leading lights (also known as range lights in the United States) are a pair of light beacons, used in navigation to indicate a safe passage for vessels entering a shallow or dangerous channel; and may also be used for position fixing. At night, the lights are a form of leading line that can be used for safe navigation. The beacons consist of two lights that are separated in distance and elevation, so that when they are aligned, with one above the other, they provide a bearing. Range lights are often illuminated day and night.
In some cases the two beacons are unlighted, in which case they are known as a range in the United States or a transit in the UK. The beacons may be artificial or natural.
Usage examples of "leading lights".
It was called a Craft Fair for the New Age and George was seemingly one of its leading lights.
According to the chamberlain's note, many other leading lights of the performing arts will also be at the dinner.
These were the late sixties, and the brief renaissance of Ukrainian literature and poetry back in the Ukraine had come and gone, its leading lights mostly by then doing slave labor in the camps of Gulag.
Faustus_ and _Melmoth the Wanderer_, and established him as one of the genre's leading lights.
They had threaded their way cautiously through the Barrier Reef to get to it, spending one night hove-to because Dwight judged it dangerous to navigate in darkness in such waters, where the lighthouses and leading lights were unreliable.
Canon Stuart Morris, one of the leading lights in the Peace Pledge Union, also ran on a pacifist ticket.
On both sides of this corridor only every other door bore a number, and it was a safe assumption that the numberless doors were the corridor entrances to the private bathrooms adjoining each room -- the Russians accorded to their top scientists facilities and accommodation commonly reserved in other and less realistic countries for film stars, aristocracy and the leading lights of society.
Now the world of psychiatry was about to feel the full degradation of one of its leading lights.
One of the leading lights of Hydra was the late Fletcher Pratt, a marvelous, lovable, feisty man who had once been a bantamweight prize fighter and converted himself into the writer who produced the best one-volume history of the Civil War ever in print (among very much else that is noteworthy).
The other leading lights of the commission were Collins and a clergyman.
The dancer in question was Rowan Carson Mackenzie, one of the leading lights of Dun Carson, whose heart had been his father's farmstead before the Change.
They had reached the pier, guided unerringly by the blue leading lights.
He didn't think, when they came to arrest them at Quarry Cove after the job was blown, that there would be too much fight from Harry's leading lights.
Walsh is one of the leading lights of the transpersonal movement, and his balanced and sane overview, decisive in many ways, is a major contribution to the field.
Martian geology, with Sax grilling her for the most part, learning from her as from a professor, but always able to contribute from the standpoint of a theoretical physicist, one of the leading lights a decade or two before, in his postgraduate years.