| PAR EXCELLANCE |
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PAR EXCELLENCE |
Photoshop is the picture-editing software par excellence. We often italicize this phrase—meaning roughly “finest or most characteristic of its type,” “exemplary”—to indicate it is French. The French pronounce the final syllable “-ahnss” (with a nasalized N which is hard for English-speakers to master), but that is no justification for misspelling the word as “excellance.” Although they pronounce it differently, they spell “excellence” the same way we do.