From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishfinessefi‧nesse1 /fəˈnes/ noun [uncountable] GOOD ATif you do something with finesse, you do it with a lot of skill and style Dario played the sonata with great finesse.
Examples from the Corpus
finesse• The stats make her a strange hybrid of power and finesse, a combination that she resisted for a while.• The game was a hard slog with no finesse, despite the promotion aspirations of both sides.• Flame control: a certain amount of finesse is required to fine tune the heat output.• It is the trick of the big-stage musical number but applied to circus with finesse and much tongue-in-cheek humour.finessefinesse2 verb [transitive] 1 DEAL WITHto handle a situation well, but in a way that is slightly deceitful2 American EnglishGOOD AT to do something with a lot of skill and styleExamples from the Corpus
finesse• Roberts finessed his arrival, speaking to Fernandez privately about their shared responsibilities.• Kemp uses his creativity to find excuses which are meant to finesse problematic moments.• Mr Chen's approach is to finesse the problem of reunification through a mixture of goodwill and verbal subtlety.• I had a miserable quantitative background and ended up copying some assignments and finessing the rest as best I could.• The guard would know he was trying to get away and finesse the whole thing!• Somehow, we hoped, when the test finally came, she would be able to finesse the written stuff.Origin finesse1 (1500-1600) French fin; → FINE1 