at one stroke

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English

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Alternative forms

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Prepositional phrase

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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.

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