jeu d'esprit
Americannoun
plural
jeux d'esprit-
a witticism.
-
a literary work showing keen wit or intelligence rather than profundity.
noun
Etymology
Origin of jeu d'esprit
Literally, “play of spirit”
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Still, there is one difference: Irregulars regard such playful ingenuity as merely an intellectual game, a literal jeu d’esprit.
From Washington Post • Apr. 21, 2023
The story proper begins almost as a light-hearted jeu d’esprit.
From Washington Post • Jul. 15, 2015
Ratmansky’s Violente keeps her arms closer to her chest, and deploys them more softly, so that the pointing becomes a sort of jeu d’esprit.
From The New Yorker • Jun. 8, 2015
His photograph, although a jeu d’esprit, exudes a whiff of melancholy because like all photographs it’s a reminder, with that shadow, of something gone except in the picture and our recollections of it.
From New York Times • Oct. 5, 2010
Did not Buckinghamshire produce ‘The Election of the Laureat’—the prototype of Leigh Hunt’s ‘Feast of the Poets,’ and of a still more recent jeu d’esprit by Mr. Robert Buchanan?
From By-ways in Book-land Short Essays on Literary Subjects by Adams, William Davenport
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.
