aperçu
/ˌæ.pɚˈsuː/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: 1.04 in modern English
7
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
3
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A clever or insightful distillation; an aphorism.
Example Sentences
- "I insisted on how his opinion mattered, and developed and construed his platitudes into aperçus he was far from entertaining himself."
- "In this place you can go to a year's worth of dinner parties without hearing anyone quote an aperçu he first heard on Charlie Rose."
- "Every so often a hobo (Mr. [Tom] Hanks again) materializes to dispense a cryptic aperçu to the boy, maybe because the child is the father of the man or because the film's envelope-pushing gobbled up most of the budget and there was only enough money for one star."
- "President [Barack] Obama disdains sound bites, and he does not have Bill Clinton's talent for reducing the abstruse to aperçus."
- "While we know – because the script tells us so – that the people we are watching are in love and in pain and in trouble, they never come across as more than dispensers of sparkling aperçus."
- "These paragraphs contain many freighted aperçus, formulations over which debates continue to rage, such as that ‘[t]he executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’ (1.12); […]"
Etymology
Origin
- Source language: French
Word Breakdown
- Root: aperçu
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˌæ.pɚˈsuː/
- British English: /ˌa.pɛːˈsjuː/