redeeming feature

1. A good quality or aspect that makes up for other drawbacks, as in The house isn't very attractive, but the garden is the redeeming feature. This idiom, first recorded in 1827, uses redeem in the sense of “compensate.”

Example Sentences

They offered not one redeeming feature as they slumped again, the visiting fans suffering as they made their way home from a freezing west London night.

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“I couldn’t find a single redeeming feature about this utterly loathsome figure.”

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“I stumbled and hemmed and hawed and carried on and figured that the only redeeming feature of the whole thing was my mother in New York couldn’t see me make a fool of myself. But it was pretty bad. Anyway I survived the experience.”

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If “Intrusion” has one redeeming feature, it’s Marshall-Green, whose performance as the husband with a dark secret has a crackling, tightly controlled intensity far more nuanced and persuasive than anything else in the film.

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Its only redeeming feature is that the words are so tiny I can’t read them.

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