billet-doux
Americannoun
plural
billets-douxnoun
Etymology
Origin of billet-doux
1665–75; < French: literally, sweet note. See billet 1, douce
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.
Anderson has inscribed a billet-doux to The New Yorker in its mid-20th-century glory years that is, at the same time, an ardent, almost orgiastic paean to the pleasures of print.
From New York Times • Oct. 20, 2021
“Wayward” is a billet-doux to that city, where Spiotta teaches at Syracuse University’s creative writing program.
From Washington Post • Aug. 6, 2021
Nine years later, Melville assigned himself a far weightier role, as a journalist, in “Two Men in Manhattan,” his billet-doux to New York, complete with a suitably blowsy score.
From The New Yorker • Apr. 24, 2017
Bodinetz's production, jointly presented with English Touring Theatre, is refreshingly rococo – it's almost a novelty to witness a set of Molière characters corresponding through billet-doux rather than by text message.
From The Guardian • Feb. 21, 2013
I send you three comforters in your prison—a billet-doux, a new novel, and a pattern of my sandal: a billet-doux from R*** says everything for itself; but I must say something for the new novel.
From Leonora by Edgeworth, Maria
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.
