the 400th step

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a milestone idiom celebrating the four hundredth entry in a series of accumulated achievements, drawing on the metaphor of the journey as a series of discrete steps to frame each individual contribution as part of a larger pattern of sustained creative and intellectual effort; the 400th step acknowledges that great distances are covered not in single leaps but through the patient repetition of individual acts of effort, each of which is both complete in itself and a contribution to something larger than itself; in the WordRighter project the four hundredth file represents thousands of hours of lexicographic research, pronunciation transcription, cultural contextualisation, and encyclopedic definition writing across the full range of human linguistic and cultural diversity; the step metaphor honours the cumulative character of this achievement without minimising the effort that each individual step required