Word.ws English Dictionary

coup de force

coup de force noun: a sudden, violent act.

Noun

coup de force (plural coups de force)

  1. A sudden, violent act.
    • On 26 August 1718, in a remarkable coup de force, Orléans crushed the political audacity and embryonic constitutional pretensions of the Parlement.2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin, published 2003, page 46
    • The undecidable issue between these different institutions and procedures had in the end to be determined at the boundary of all of them, through coups de force.2004, Charles Taylor, “The Sovereign People”, in Modern Social Imaginaries (Public Planet Books), Durham, NC: Duke University Press, →ISBN, page 139

Examples of coup de force in a sentence

  • Then, in a remarkable coup de force, he convinced Lilienthal to set up a naval reactors branch at the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)—and had himself appointed its head.2012, Richard Martin, “The Birth of Nuclear Power”, in SuperFuel: Thorium, the Green Energy Source for the Future, New York, NY: St....
  • On 9 March 1945, […] the Japanese launched a coup de force, overthrowing eighty years of French rule in a matter of days.2016, Christopher Goscha, The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam, Penguin, published 2017, page 203:

Forms of coup de force

pluralcoups de force

Origin of coup de force

Borrowed from French coup de force.

Questions about coup de force

What does coup de force mean?
Coup de force means a sudden, violent act.
How do you use coup de force in a sentence?
Then, in a remarkable coup de force, he convinced Lilienthal to set up a naval reactors branch at the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)—and had himself appointed its head.
What part of speech is coup de force?
Coup de force is a noun.
What is the plural of coup de force?
The plural of coup de force is coups de force.

Words near coup de force in the dictionary

  1. coup d'oeil
  2. coup d'théâtre
  3. coup d'état
  4. coup d'états
  5. coup d'œil
  6. coup de force
  7. coup de foudre
  8. coup de grace
  9. coup de grâce
  10. coup de main
  11. coup de maitre

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: coup de force (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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