paragon

paragon n Paragon, apotheosis, nonpareil, nonesuch are comparable when they mean a person or thing of consum-mate quality or transcendent excellence in its kind.

Paragon distinctively implies supremacy and incomparability

{

an angel! or, if not, an earthly paragon—Shak.

}

{

Mill's book is a paragon of expository writing— Macy

}

{

neither the violent demagogue his enemies thought, nor the paragon his friends esteemed him— Bonham

}

Apotheosis basically applies to a raising from an earthly to a divine or ideal status

{

Wagner believed that Beethoven's Seventh Symphony . . . was an apotheosis of the dance— Ellis

}

but it may be indistinguishable from paragon in denoting one that is the extreme and usually the highest of its kind

{

here all is spotless grace, ethereal delicacy ... the very apotheosis of womanhood— Jameson

}

{

in the Third Reich the nation-state found both its zenith and its nadir, its apotheosis and its Black Mass— Deutscher

}

Nonpareil and nonesuch, like paragon imply the absence of a rival or equal, but they sometimes impute uniqueness more strongly than excellence

{

thou art the best o' the cutthroats: yet he's good that did the like for Fleance: if thou didst it, thou art the nonpareil—Shak.

}

{

it was the strapping leader, the nonpareil of newspaper-dom— Swanberg

}

{

a nonpareil at her dimly lit specialties, but . . . certainly no Fitzgerald— Hentoff

}

{

the Eiffel Tower, the mighty nonesuch of the Paris exposition— Kobler

}

{

for more than fifty years a political boss, a political nonesuch, and a general nuisance to the forces of political progress— New Yorker

}