meet one's Waterloo

A reference to Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeat by armies of Britain and Prussia at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815, which marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Waterloo is a municipality south of Brussels in what is now the province of Walloon Brabant, Belgium.

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈmiːt wʌnz ˌwɔːtə(ɹ)ˈluː/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈmit wʌnz ˌwɔtɚˈluː/, /ˌwɑ-/, /ˈwɔtɚˌluː/, /ˈwɑ-/

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• Hyphenation: meet one's Wa‧ter‧loo

meet one's Waterloo (third-person singular simple present meets one's Waterloo, present participle meeting one's Waterloo, simple past and past participle met one's Waterloo)

1. To be decisively defeated by an encounter with a powerful opponent or a problem that is too difficult.

• meet one's doom
• meet one's end

• “meet your Waterloo” in the Cambridge English Dictionary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• “meet one's Waterloo” in Merriam–Webster Online Dictionary.

• Battle of Waterloo on Wikipedia.Wikipedia