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bête noire
[ beyt nwahr; French bet nwar ]
noun
- a person or thing especially disliked or dreaded; bane; bugbear.
bête noire
/ bɛt nwar /
noun
- a person or thing that one particularly dislikes or dreads
bête noire
- Something or someone a person views with particular dislike: “The new candidate for governor is the bête noire of all the liberals in the state.” From French, meaning “black beast.”
51Թ History and Origins
Origin of bête noire1
51Թ History and Origins
Origin of bête noire1
Idioms and Phrases
A person or thing that is particularly disliked. For example, Calculus was the bête noire of my freshman courses . This phrase, French for “black beast,” entered the English language in the early 1800s. For synonyms, see pain in the neck ; thorn in one's flesh .Example Sentences
When Dowd interviewed Jane Fonda in 2020, she asked the movie star/workout queen/bête noire of the right wing if she wanted to have sex with Che Guevara.
“To protect smelt from water pumps, government regulators have flushed 1.4 trillion gallons of water into the San Francisco Bay since 2008,” the Wall Street Journal reported in a spectacularly uninformed column in 2015 that libeled the fish as “the cause célèbre of environmentalists and bête noire of parched farmers.”
A frequent Fox News bête noire, he routinely carries legislation that makes headlines and pushes Democrats from the left.
But it remains a bête noire for critics of mass incarceration.
They are the bête noire of many nutritionists - mass-produced yet moreish foods like chicken nuggets, packaged snacks, fizzy drinks, ice cream or even sliced brown bread.
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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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