Meaning of avant la lettre | Babel Free

Definitions

Before the term was coined (the term being a word or phrase used just previously in an anachronistic way)

idiomatic

Equivalents

Examples

“Suffragettes were feminists avant la lettre.”

“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”?”

“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?”

“as St Francis of Assisi was recently discovered to be an ecologist avant la lettre”

“a work with a title that is a marketing dream, pure Julia Child well avant la lettre: Le Cuisinier français, The French Chef.”

“One might even advance the case for Wilde's being a celebrity avant la lettre, famous partly for being famous”

“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.”

CEFR level