Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adverb For lack of something better.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adverb For
want of somethingbetter ; for lack of an alternative.
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
[French : faute, lack + de, of + mieux, better.]
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Borrowing from French.
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Examples
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Well, faute de mieux, we eventually decided on being each other’s husband and are totally comfortable with that.
DesignerBlog Will 2009
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Well, faute de mieux, we eventually decided on being each other’s husband and are totally comfortable with that.
Archive 2009-07-01 Will 2009
laiane commented on the word faute de mieux
From the French, "for lack of something better."
I encountered this in a current article in The London Review of Books (about Weimar Germany):
"What, looking back, was so characteristic about the culture of a shortlived German republic that nobody had really wanted and most Germans accepted as faute de mieux at best?"
January 24, 2008
MaryW commented on the word faute de mieux
Richard Gameson, "The Image of the Medieval Library," in Alice Crawford ed., The Meaning of the Library: A Cultural History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2015)December 26, 2015