bête noire

Definition

Someone or something that is unbearable and so particularly avoided or disliked; the bane of someone's existence; an object of aversion; an anathema.

Etymology

Unadapted borrowing from French bête noire (“(figurative) intolerable person”, literally “black beast”).

Example Sentences

• "[A] petticoated politician was [Napoleon] Bonaparte's bête noire, or antipathy, […]"
• "No reader can be ignorant that for many years past the bêtes noires of the Whigs and Radicals were what they delighted to call ‘political parsons.’ If the clergyman was a magistrate, he was libelled as a political parson; if he presided at a vestry that levied a church-rate, he was persecuted as a political parson."
• "[…] I found at length that the widow was growing dreadfully afraid of me, calling me her bête noire, her dark spirit, her murderous adorer, and a thousand other names indicative of her extreme disquietude and terror."

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