piece de resistance

Questions about piece de resistance

What does piece de resistance mean?

piece de resistance means "the outstanding item (the prize piece or main exhibit) in a collection". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

What is another word for piece de resistance?

Close synonyms include collector's item, showpiece. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is piece de resistance a common word?

piece de resistance is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.