Word.ws English Dictionary

succès d'estime

succès d'estime noun: critical success for a work of art, regardless of whether the work is popular with the general public.

Noun

succès d'estime

  1. Critical success for a work of art, regardless of whether the work is popular with the general public.
    • Walter Minton, he felt convinced, had resigned himself to Putnam's other Nabokov books earning no more than a succès d'estime, and so had projected limited sales, offered modest advances, and advertised little.1993, Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, →ISBN, page 518
    • The surreal Being John Malkovich, for instance, was pretty far down the highest-grossing list, but it was a succès d'estime (it showed up on most critics' lists of the year's best movies), as was the stylish and often grisly (far more violent than the average animated movie) Japanise animated...2012, Gardner Dozois, The Mammoth Book of Best New SF, →ISBN

Examples of succès d'estime in a sentence

  • In the literary world he was rapidly gaining renown: there had been the succès d'estime of his first three books, and then the publication of Austerlitz earlier that year.2013 March 22, Emily Temple, “'He Had No Set Assignments': Students' Recollections of Authors as Professors”, in The Atlantic:
  • The former, though a famous title, has never established itself in revival even as a succès d'estime.2015, Ethan Mordden, Sing for Your Supper: The Broadway Musical in the 1930s, →ISBN, page 170:

Origin of succès d'estime

Borrowed from French succès d'estime.

Questions about succès d'estime

What does succès d'estime mean?
Succès d'estime means critical success for a work of art, regardless of whether the work is popular with the general public.
How do you use succès d'estime in a sentence?
In the literary world he was rapidly gaining renown: there had been the succès d'estime of his first three books, and then the publication of Austerlitz earlier that year.
What part of speech is succès d'estime?
Succès d'estime is a noun.

Words near succès d'estime in the dictionary

  1. succusses
  2. succussing
  3. succussion
  4. succussions
  5. succussive
  6. succès d'estime
  7. succès de scandale
  8. succès fou
  9. succès fous
  10. Suceava
  11. Sucellus

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: succès d'estime (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: “succès d'estime.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/succ%C3%A8s_d%27estime. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.