at one stroke

English

Alternative forms

Prepositional phrase

at one stroke

  1. (literal) With a single blow, effort, or act.
    • 1895, Thomas Hardy, chapter 9, in Jude the Obscure:
      I made up my mind that a man confined to his room by inflammation of the lungs, a fellow who had only two wishes left in the world, to see a particular woman, and then to die, could neatly accomplish those two wishes at one stroke by taking this journey in the rain.
    • 1898, G. A. Henty, “On A Mexican Ranche”, in Yule Logs: Longmans' Christmas Annual:
      I should be ready to do the job without being paid for it, though I don't say it is not sweeter to get both gold and revenge at one stroke.
  2. (figuratively, by extension) At once, immediately; in an instant.
    • 1903, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, chapter 7, in Robert Browning:
      [T]he whole object of the poem is to show what infinities of spiritual good and evil a current and sordid story may contain. When once this is realised, it explains at one stroke the innumerable facts about the work.
    • 1909, Edith Wharton, “A Torchbearer”, in Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses:
      . . . with the wind of ruin in his hair,
      Soul sprang full-statured from the broken flesh,
      And at one stroke he lived the whole of life.
    • 1916, Booth Tarkington, chapter 7, in Seventeen:
      At one stroke his dashing raiment gave him high superiority over Johnnie Watson and other rivals who might loom.
    • 1997 December 14, Vicki Goldberg, “Photography View: One Eye on Art, the Other on Commerce”, in New York Times, retrieved 1 January 2014:
      In a blaze of creativity during 10 days in 1950 photographing the Paris collections, he became at one stroke one of the major fashion photographers of the century.

Synonyms

Translations

See also

This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.