Meaning
A single fatal weakness in someone or something otherwise strong and secure - the one vulnerable point that can bring the whole down. The phrase is the standard shorthand for the flaw of the mighty: the unbeatable champion, the fortress, the perfect system, each undone through the spot nobody armoured. Works at every register and almost always with the possessive apostrophe; note it names the weakness itself, not the person who has it. Regional use: General English; classical Greek origin.
Origin
Homer's Iliad foretells Achilles' death but never stages it, and the invulnerability story is later: the best-known version, Statius's Achilleid, has his mother Thetis dipping the infant in the River Styx while holding him by the heel, the one spot her grip left unprotected, while an older tradition in Apollonius's Argonautica has her burning away his mortality in the fire. The word entered English anatomy long before idiom: in 1693 the anatomist Philip Verheyen described the tendon commonly called the cord of Achilles. The figurative expression is strikingly recent - Samuel Taylor Coleridge implied it in 1810 with 'Ireland, that vulnerable heel of the British Achilles!', and the Oxford English Dictionary dates the phrase as an expression meaning a weak spot only to 1840. Wiktionary's record runs from Coleridge to Ian Fleming's Casino Royale (1953), where an agent's habits and predilections are an Achilles heel his handlers exploit.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- Achilles' heels
- an Achilles' heel
- the Achilles' heel of
Usage Examples
- Penalty kills were the champions' Achilles' heel all season, and the finals exposed it cruelly.
- The bridge design was sound except for one Achilles' heel: the expansion joints nobody had inspected since 1988.
- Her Achilles' heel in interviews was salary talk; she folded at the first low offer every time.