carte blanche

Pluralcartes blanches (some meanings)

1. 1
   free handnoununcountable

   Unlimited power to act as one judges best, with no restrictions placed on one's authority.

   The owners gave the new chef carte blanche to rebuild the menu from scratch.

   With carte blanche from the board, the incoming director closed three failing branches in her first month.

   Similarfreedom, license, latitude, discretion

   Note

   Authority signed away in advance is the picture here. In French carte blanche means a blank or white card, and the image is the signed blank paper: whatever the holder writes, the signature already endorses. In English it is usually given, as when Paramount gave the Marx Brothers carte blanche, and it often takes to plus a verb (carte blanche to act). Blank check rests on the same image.

2. 2
   signed blank papernouncountable

   A blank sheet of paper, already signed by someone in authority, that is handed to another person to fill in however they please.

   Before the envoy sailed, the king signed a carte blanche so that the treaty's terms could be written in above his name later.

   Among the general's papers, archivists found two cartes blanches, each signed by the emperor and never filled in.

   Note

   Here carte blanche is the paper itself, the original behind the free-authority meaning, and as an object it counts: one carte blanche, two cartes blanches, both words taking the plural -s as in French. Oliver Sacks's Uncle Tungsten (2001) has a homelier version: a checkbook handed to his aunt Lina, carte blanche.

3. 3
   without distinctionadverb

   As one undivided group, with no regard for the differences between the individual members or cases.

   The committee rejected the grant applications carte blanche, without reading a single proposal on its merits.

   For decades, women were excluded carte blanche from the club's board, whatever their qualifications.

   Similarwholesale, indiscriminately

   Oppositeindividually, selectively

   Note

   This adverb may have grown from a slip, a confusion with another French phrase, en masse, whose meaning it borrowed. It sits right after its verb, most often one of shutting out: excluded carte blanche. Beside the free-authority meaning, that phrase can read as exclusion licensed without limit, so en masse is the safer choice when the sense must be unmistakable.

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