carte blanche

plural cartes blanches

1. countableuncountableUnlimited discretionary power to act; unrestricted authority.

   “[…] But since when did army officers afford the luxury of amanuenses in this simple republic ?[…]Does your carte blanche run so far as that also ?”

   1910, Emerson Hough, chapter I, in The Purchase Price: Or The Cause of Compromise, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC

   4 more examples

   We have given technology carte blanche, much in the way Congress has always, in the past, given automatic approval to defense budgets, resulting in the most gigantic graft in history.

   1970, Philip Slater, The Pursuit Of Loneliness, Boston: Beacon Press, page 128

   Baron Cohen and director Larry Charles have indeed retreated with The Dictator, but they’ve gone back 80 years, when the Marx Brothers were given carte blanche at Paramount Pictures with a five-movie run that ended with their best movie, 1933’s Duck Soup.

   2012 May 15, Scott Tobias, “Film: Reviews: The Dictator”, in The Onion AV Club, archived from the original on 11 Jul 2012

   Somewhat unsurprisingly, unleashing the most powerful navy on the planet with carte blanche to exterminate slavers on sight saw a dramatic and sudden collapse in slaver numbers in the late 1840s and early 1850s.

   2018 December 1, Drachinifel, 10:12 from the start, in Anti-Slavery Patrols - The West Africa Squadron, archived from the original on 29 Nov 2024

   That’s especially the case since the Supreme Court issued a ruling last year that provides a former president with immunity from criminal prosecution for all “official acts” taken while in office. Trump and MAGA world interpret this, and not without cause, as giving them carte blanche.

   2025 March 20, Peter Wehner, “Trump’s Appetite for Revenge Is Insatiable”, in The Atlantic, archived from the original on 20 Mar 2025

   Synonyms: free hand, free rein, proxy in blank, blank check

2. countableuncountableA blank paper that is signed by some authority and given to a person to fill as they please.

   2001, Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Alfred A. Knopf (2001), 15, Indeed, I later learned that when they had bought the place, in 1930, they had given my father's older sister Lina their checkbook, carte blanche, saying, "Do what you want, get what you want."

   Synonyms: proxy in blank

3. countableuncountablecard gamesA hand with no court cards.
4. countablehistoricaluncountablebankingA chargecard issued by Diners Club International.

1. As an undifferentiated mass, without regard to distinctions; willy-nilly. (Possibly from confusion with another French phrase, en masse.)

   Can gay and lesbian people in justice be excluded carte blanche from the sacrament of sexual love sharing, let alone from church membership or leadership?

   2007, Gordon J. Hilsman, Intimate Spirituality: The Catholic Way of Love and Sex, →ISBN, page 114

   1 more example

   The mass production of tennis equipment made it more affordable, such that blue-collar workers were no longer excluded carte blanche as before the war (Birley 1995b).

   2014, Robert J. Lake, A Social History of Tennis in Britain, →ISBN