Word.ws English Dictionary

avant la lettre

avant la lettre prepositional phrase: before the term was coined (the term being a word or phrase used just previously in an anachronistic way).

Prepositional phrase

  1. (idiomatic) Before the term was coined (the term being a word or phrase used just previously in an anachronistic way)
    • 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”?1952, George Sarton, A History of Science

Examples of avant la lettre in a sentence

  • 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?1973, Marlies Kronegger, Literary Impressionism:
  • as St Francis of Assisi was recently discovered to be an ecologist avant la lettre1998, Dominik Declercq, Writing Against the State: Political Rhetorics in Third and Fourth Century China, page 341:
  • a work with a title that is a marketing dream, pure Julia Child well avant la lettre: Le Cuisinier français, The French Chef.2007, Joan DeJean, The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafes, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour...
  • One might even advance the case for Wilde's being a celebrity avant la lettre, famous partly for being famous2010, Stefano Evangelista, The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe, page 65:

Origin of avant la lettre

Borrowed from French avant la lettre (literally “before the letter”).

Questions about avant la lettre

What does avant la lettre mean?
Avant la lettre means before the term was coined (the term being a word or phrase used just previously in an anachronistic way).
How do you use avant la lettre in a sentence?
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?
What part of speech is avant la lettre?
Avant la lettre is a prepositional phrase.

Words near avant la lettre in the dictionary

  1. Avans
  2. Avanses
  3. Avansian
  4. avant
  5. avant basic
  6. avant la lettre
  7. avant-basic
  8. avant-corps
  9. avant-courier
  10. avant-couriers
  11. avant-dance

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: avant la lettre (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “avant la lettre.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/avant_la_lettre. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.