carte blanche

Borrowed from French carte blanche, referring to a blank or white card.

• enPR: kärt-blänsh, IPA^(key): /kɑɹtˈblɑnʃ/

carte blanche (plural cartes blanches)

1. Unlimited discretionary power to act; unrestricted authority.
   • 1910, Emerson Hough, chapter I, in The Purchase Price: Or The Cause of Compromise, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, OCLC 639762314, page 0088:

     “[…] 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 ?”

   • 2012 May 15, Scott Tobias, “Film: Reviews: The Dictator”, in The Onion AV Club:

     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.

   • 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.

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

• proxy in blank
• blank check

carte blanche

1. As an undifferentiated mass, without regard to distinctions; willy-nilly. (Possibly from confusion with another French phrase, en masse.)
   • 2007, Gordon J. Hilsman, Intimate Spirituality: The Catholic Way of Love and Sex →ISBN, page 114:

     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?

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

     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).

• IPA^(key): /kaʁ.t(ə) blɑ̃ʃ/

carte blanche f (plural cartes blanches)

1. carte blanche (unlimited discretionary power to act; unrestricted authority)

   Synonym: champ libre

   avoir carte blanche ― (please add an English translation of this usage example)

   donner carte blanche ― (please add an English translation of this usage example)