carte blanche
English
Etymology
Borrowed from French carte blanche, referring to a blank or white card.
Pronunciation
Noun
carte blanche (plural cartes blanches)
- Unlimited discretionary power to act; unrestricted authority.
- Template:RQ:EHough PrqsPrc
- “[…] But since when did army officers afford the luxury of amanuenses in this simple republic ? […] Does your carte blanche run so far as that also ?”
- 2012 May 15, Scott Tobias, “Film: Reviews: The Dictator”, in The Onion AV Club:
- Baron Cohen and director Larry Charles have indeed retreated with The Dictator, but they’ve gone back 80 years, when the Marx Brothers were given carte blanche at Paramount Pictures with a five-movie run that ended with their best movie, 1933’s Duck Soup.
- 2001, Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Alfred A. Knopf (2001), 15,
- Indeed, I later learned that when they had bought the place, in 1930, they had given my father's older sister Lina their checkbook, carte blanche, saying, "Do what you want, get what you want.
- Template:RQ:EHough PrqsPrc
- A blank paper that is signed by some authority and given to a person to fill as they please.
Synonyms
Translations
unlimited discretionary power to act; unrestricted authority
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Adverb
carte blanche
- As an undifferentiated mass, without regard to distinctions; willy-nilly. (Possibly from confusion with another French phrase, en masse.)
- 2007, Gordon J. Hilsman, Intimate Spirituality: The Catholic Way of Love and Sex, →ISBN, page 114:
- Can gay and lesbian people in justice be excluded carte blanche from the sacrament of sexual love sharing, let alone from church membership or leadership?
- 2014, Robert J. Lake, A Social History of Tennis in Britain →ISBN:
- The mass production of tennis equipment made it more affordable, such that blue-collar workers were no longer excluded carte blanche as before the war (Birley 1995b).
French
Pronunciation
Noun
carte blanche f (plural cartes blanches)
- carte blanche (unlimited discretionary power to act; unrestricted authority)
- Synonym: champ libre
- avoir carte blanche ― (please add an English translation of this usage example)
- donner carte blanche ― (please add an English translation of this usage example)
Categories:
- English terms borrowed from French
- English terms derived from French
- English 2-syllable words
- English terms with IPA pronunciation
- English lemmas
- English nouns
- English countable nouns
- English multiword terms
- English terms with quotations
- English adverbs
- French terms with IPA pronunciation
- French lemmas
- French nouns
- French countable nouns
- French multiword terms
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