Meaning
The utmost point of excellence or development; the acme or ultimate example of a quality, as when a tasting menu is called the last word in indulgence. In older use it could also denote an absolute limit that nothing may pass beyond. The phrase is bookish, often italicized, and delivered with a flourish - or with irony about such flourishes. Learned and rhetorical, often italicized; in casual use it readily turns ironic. Regional use: General English (Latin loan).
Origin
Latin for '(go) no more beyond', traditionally said to have warned sailors off on the Pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar - though no ancient source records such an inscription, and modern references describe it only as legend. The OED's earliest English evidence is from 1637, in the writing of the satirist and nonconformist minister Nathaniel Whiting, and Dictionary.com independently dates the borrowing 1690-1700. The phrase was famously reversed in the early 1500s when Emperor Charles V adopted Plus oultre, Latinized as Plus ultra, 'further beyond', once voyages had disproved the notion that Gibraltar marked the world's edge; it survives as Spain's national motto.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- ne-plus-ultra (hyphenated)
- nec plus ultra
- non plus ultra
Usage Examples
- Reviewers hailed the restoration as the ne plus ultra of archival filmmaking.
- Her chocolate souffle was, by universal agreement, the ne plus ultra of the menu.
- One critic called the hotel's butler service the ne plus ultra of pampering.