is a tour de force

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tour de force

[ t oo r d uh fawrs , - fohrs ; French too r d uh fawrs ]

Herman Melville's Moby Dick was a tour de force.

The way the president got his bill through the Senate was a tour de force.

• a feat requiring unusual strength, skill, or ingenuity.

/ ˈtʊə də ˈfɔːs; tur də fɔrs /

• a masterly or brilliant stroke, creation, effect, or accomplishment
• A feat accomplished through great skill and ability: “The speech was a tour de force; it swept the audience off its feet.”

Word History and Origins

Origin of tour de force 1

Example Sentences

In her aching memoir, she embarks on a tour de force examination of her childhood, marked first by her mother’s abandoning her when she was a toddler and later by the death of her beloved father.

Through the late 1960s, Capote claimed to be writing his masterpiece, his tour de force based on his swans, but several deadlines passed for it.

At 35, Hawa Hassan is already a tour de force when it comes to Somali food in America.

Understated yet opulent, measured, and intensely creepy, it’s a tour de force in balancing uncomfortable levels of tension and suspense with deep pathos.

Page’s tour de force performance in Hard Candy led, two years later, to Juno, a low-budget indie film that brought Page Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations and sudden megafame.

His family memoir, Sweet and Low, is a tour de force of reporting and memory—tender, curious, and exceptionally funny.

It is a tour de force of reporting: 13,000 words on a two-week deadline.

It's also a masterpiece of choreographed c--tery—Joffrey's final tour de force.

And, of course, she's best known for her ball-busting tour de force as Ed Helms's wife in The Hangover.

As a result, his version is a technical tour de force but a movie that never gets under your skin.

As a tour de force in the gentle art of lying, the snake-story is justly esteemed.

As a tour de force of geometrical imagination it would be difficult to parallel this hypothesis.

The physical tour de force, was one of those feats of agility in which Neb had been my instructor, ten years before.

If the Mastersingers was a little less successful as a work of art we should still have to regard it as an amazing tour de force.

The music for such incidents cannot be of the highest beauty; here we have one of the cases of a tour de force.