Par Excellance or 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.