redeeming feature

Idioms  

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.”

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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.

From BBC • Oct. 25, 2025

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

From Los Angeles Times • May 6, 2023

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.

From New York Times • Sep. 22, 2021

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

From Washington Post • Dec. 31, 2020

This was at least one redeeming feature amid all the horrors of that dreadful practice.

From Latitude 19 degree A Romance of the West Indies in the Year of Our Lord Eighteen Hundred and Twenty by Crowninshield, Mrs. Schuyler