See avant la lettre in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
Download JSON data for avant la lettre meaning in English (3.4kB)
{
"etymology_templates": [
{
"args": {
"1": "en",
"2": "fr",
"3": "avant la lettre",
"lit": "before the letter"
},
"expansion": "French avant la lettre (literally “before the letter”)",
"name": "bor"
}
],
"etymology_text": "Borrowed from French avant la lettre (literally “before the letter”).",
"head_templates": [
{
"args": {
"1": "en",
"2": "prepositional phrase",
"head": "avant la lettre"
},
"expansion": "avant la lettre",
"name": "head"
},
{
"args": {
"head": "avant la lettre"
},
"expansion": "avant la lettre",
"name": "en-PP"
}
],
"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "prep_phrase",
"senses": [
{
"categories": [
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
"parents": [
"Entries with incorrect language header",
"Entry maintenance"
],
"source": "w"
}
],
"examples": [
{
"text": "Suffragettes were feminists avant la lettre.\n(the word \"feminist\" did not exist during their era)",
"type": "example"
},
{
"ref": "1952, George Sarton, A History of Science",
"text": "Could the Greeks of that time, whose minds were frustrated and demoralized by defeat and misery, be expected to give a welcome to those premature Quakers and to those Tolstoyans “avant la lettre”?",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "1973, Marlies Kronegger, Literary Impressionism",
"text": "How is it, then, that Flaubert was a somber impressionist avant la lettre, when the school of painters was remarkably cheerful with the exception of both Degas and Van Gogh?",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "1998, Dominik Declercq, Writing Against the State: Political Rhetorics in Third and Fourth Century China, page 341",
"text": "as St Francis of Assisi was recently discovered to be an ecologist avant la lettre",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2007, Joan DeJean, The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafes, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour, page 107",
"text": "a work with a title that is a marketing dream, pure Julia Child well avant la lettre: Le Cuisinier français, The French Chef.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2010, Stefano Evangelista, The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe, page 65",
"text": "One might even advance the case for Wilde's being a celebrity avant la lettre, famous partly for being famous",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2015 February 27, Laura Kipnis, “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe”, in The Chronicle of Higher Education",
"text": "You have to feel a little sorry these days for professors married to their former students. They used to be respectable citizens—leaders in their fields, department chairs, maybe even a dean or two—and now they’re abusers of power avant la lettre.",
"type": "quotation"
}
],
"glosses": [
"Before the term was coined (the term being a word or phrase used just previously in an anachronistic way)"
],
"id": "en-avant_la_lettre-en-prep_phrase-4tn3V3lY",
"links": [
[
"anachronistic",
"anachronistic"
]
],
"raw_glosses": [
"(idiomatic) Before the term was coined (the term being a word or phrase used just previously in an anachronistic way)"
],
"related": [
{
"word": "retronym"
},
{
"word": "proto"
},
{
"word": "proto-"
}
],
"tags": [
"idiomatic"
],
"translations": [
{
"code": "fi",
"lang": "Finnish",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "ennen sanan olemassaoloa"
},
{
"code": "fr",
"lang": "French",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "avant la lettre"
},
{
"code": "it",
"lang": "Italian",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "ante litteram"
}
]
}
],
"word": "avant la lettre"
}
{
"etymology_templates": [
{
"args": {
"1": "en",
"2": "fr",
"3": "avant la lettre",
"lit": "before the letter"
},
"expansion": "French avant la lettre (literally “before the letter”)",
"name": "bor"
}
],
"etymology_text": "Borrowed from French avant la lettre (literally “before the letter”).",
"head_templates": [
{
"args": {
"1": "en",
"2": "prepositional phrase",
"head": "avant la lettre"
},
"expansion": "avant la lettre",
"name": "head"
},
{
"args": {
"head": "avant la lettre"
},
"expansion": "avant la lettre",
"name": "en-PP"
}
],
"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "prep_phrase",
"related": [
{
"word": "retronym"
},
{
"word": "proto"
},
{
"word": "proto-"
}
],
"senses": [
{
"categories": [
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"English multiword terms",
"English prepositional phrases",
"English terms borrowed from French",
"English terms derived from French",
"English terms with quotations",
"English terms with usage examples",
"Quotation templates to be cleaned",
"Translation table header lacks gloss"
],
"examples": [
{
"text": "Suffragettes were feminists avant la lettre.\n(the word \"feminist\" did not exist during their era)",
"type": "example"
},
{
"ref": "1952, George Sarton, A History of Science",
"text": "Could the Greeks of that time, whose minds were frustrated and demoralized by defeat and misery, be expected to give a welcome to those premature Quakers and to those Tolstoyans “avant la lettre”?",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "1973, Marlies Kronegger, Literary Impressionism",
"text": "How is it, then, that Flaubert was a somber impressionist avant la lettre, when the school of painters was remarkably cheerful with the exception of both Degas and Van Gogh?",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "1998, Dominik Declercq, Writing Against the State: Political Rhetorics in Third and Fourth Century China, page 341",
"text": "as St Francis of Assisi was recently discovered to be an ecologist avant la lettre",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2007, Joan DeJean, The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafes, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour, page 107",
"text": "a work with a title that is a marketing dream, pure Julia Child well avant la lettre: Le Cuisinier français, The French Chef.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2010, Stefano Evangelista, The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe, page 65",
"text": "One might even advance the case for Wilde's being a celebrity avant la lettre, famous partly for being famous",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2015 February 27, Laura Kipnis, “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe”, in The Chronicle of Higher Education",
"text": "You have to feel a little sorry these days for professors married to their former students. They used to be respectable citizens—leaders in their fields, department chairs, maybe even a dean or two—and now they’re abusers of power avant la lettre.",
"type": "quotation"
}
],
"glosses": [
"Before the term was coined (the term being a word or phrase used just previously in an anachronistic way)"
],
"links": [
[
"anachronistic",
"anachronistic"
]
],
"raw_glosses": [
"(idiomatic) Before the term was coined (the term being a word or phrase used just previously in an anachronistic way)"
],
"tags": [
"idiomatic"
]
}
],
"translations": [
{
"code": "fi",
"lang": "Finnish",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "ennen sanan olemassaoloa"
},
{
"code": "fr",
"lang": "French",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "avant la lettre"
},
{
"code": "it",
"lang": "Italian",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "ante litteram"
}
],
"word": "avant la lettre"
}
{
"called_from": "translations/382",
"msg": "no language name in translation item: Dutch\"avant la lettre",
"path": [
"avant la lettre"
],
"section": "English",
"subsection": "prepositional phrase",
"title": "avant la lettre",
"trace": ""
}
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-20 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (1d5a7d1 and 304864d). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
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