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Normally, the verb defeat cannot be applied to challenge, and the phrase seems like a semantic mistake: you can defeat an opponent, but you can beat a challenge.

But there's a character who's over-confident, vain, loves fanfare and isn't the type of person who would concern themselves with grammar too much. To a native speaker's ear, does it feel believable that he would call a challenge he created “undefeatable” just to emphasize his own greatness, or does this just sound plain wrong no matter what?

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  • If the 'character' is speaking, you can make them say what you think they would say and the reader can infer over-confidence from that, the speaker believing that it is themself who is undefeatable.
    – Weather Vane
    Commented Jan 14, 2022 at 18:41
  • There is no shortage of Google hits for the phrase: some are from social media, but some seem to be academic papers and legitimate books.
    – Stuart F
    Commented Jan 15, 2022 at 16:20

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I I have searched on 3 different corpora, surprisingly, there is no result about "Undefeatable challenge", which indicates that this phrase is not recognized by mainstream media, and the Bing search engine also failed to get any results. So I think the most reliable answer is to avoid this phrase as much as possible.

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  • Weird because Google has several hits e.g. p 223 here, blog, motivational crap, ditto, LinkedIn, etc
    – Stuart F
    Commented Jan 18, 2022 at 9:21
  • Oh, I am sorry, Google is not accessible in my area. But I still remain my opinion that if one phrase is never used by mainstream media in this age of the free flow of information and of the explosion of knowledge, we'd better not use it. There is no need for a critical spirit here.
    – ascendho
    Commented Jan 18, 2022 at 11:13

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