Meaning
To suffer a final, decisive defeat, especially one that abruptly ends a long run of success. Used almost only of a person, team, or force previously regarded as unstoppable, and it usually carries a note of hubris corrected or nemesis arriving at last. Common inflections are 'met his Waterloo' and 'meet their Waterloo'. Journalistic or wryly humorous in register, and usually capitalised because it alludes to a specific battle. Regional use: General English (battlefield allusion).
Origin
From the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815, in which Napoleon was decisively beaten by British and Prussian forces under Wellington and Blucher. The noun was first used figuratively by Byron in a letter to Thomas Moore written in Venice on 17 November 1816 (published in Moore's 1830 edition of Byron's letters), describing the Armenian alphabet as 'a Waterloo of an Alphabet'. Newspapers then worked the image as 'a Waterloo defeat' (Nashville Whig, 1824; New-York Evening Post, 1832). The full phrase appears as 'meet with a Waterloo' in the Paris correspondence printed in The Courier of London on 18 December 1832, and in the possessive form 'meet their Waterloo' in the Philadelphia Public Ledger of 25 January 1838; by 1838-39 American papers were applying it to burglars, counterfeiters, and bankrupt banks. Arthur Conan Doyle's line 'We have not yet met our Waterloo, Watson' (1905) shows the modern form fully at home.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- meet their Waterloo
- meet with a Waterloo (early 19th-century form)
- meet your Waterloo
- met his Waterloo
Usage Examples
- After a decade of dominating the regional league, the champions finally met their Waterloo in a four-nil semi-final defeat.
- The investigators had waited years for the fraudster to slip, and in the Court of Appeal he met his Waterloo.
- Every unbeaten run ends somewhere, and on Saturday the reigning champions meet their Waterloo or extend the record.