From Visual Thesaurus: coup
The silent “p” in this word is the heritage of French ancestry, whence English borrows coup.
In French a coup is an act, but the feature separating a coup from any old act is that a coup is marked by success and cleverness.
English has also borrowed a number of particular coups from French, including coup d’etat, coup de grace, coup de main, and coup d’oeil.
Look it up in the Visual Thesaurus!
