How to Use hostile in a Sentence

hostile

adjective
  • It was a small town that was hostile to outsiders.
  • The camel is specially adapted to its hostile desert habitat.
  • Her suggestions were given a hostile reception.
  • They were entering hostile territory.
  • Dugoni, a lawyer who coauthored a nonfiction book about an Idaho worker brain-damaged in 1996 by cyanide fumes, opens his debut novel with a wrongful death attorney in San Francisco, David Sloane, about to make his closing remarks defending a corporation in a similar case. Sloane, who has won 14 cases in a row, hates his arrogant client and must face an obviously hostile jury.
    Publishers Weekly, 9 Jan. 2006
  • Then Paul had a hostile takeover in the fourth quarter.
    Duane Rankin, The Arizona Republic, 5 May 2022
  • And, as is often the case, some of those ads have been hostile.
    Trisha Thadani, SFChronicle.com, 2 Nov. 2020
  • Most of the celebrities were deemed hostile to Trump and his policies.
    Beth Mole, Ars Technica, 30 Oct. 2020
  • And then people do get angry at them and do get hostile.
    CBS News, 29 Mar. 2023
  • The story of Trump’s rise is often told as a hostile takeover.
    Evan Osnos, The New Yorker, 3 May 2020
  • There is overwhelming chaos in the universe, and our part in it is hostile.
    Roberto Brunelli, The Hollywood Reporter, 2 Oct. 2023
  • The robots play a more hostile part of the game’s peaceful narrative, and are the force against that.
    George Yang, Wired, 17 May 2021
  • The city, still ruled by Jim Crow laws, proved hostile.
    Teresa Nowakowski, Smithsonian Magazine, 16 Nov. 2023
  • To make matters worse, much of the unit artillery is lost during the landing to hostile fire.
    Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, 26 Apr. 2018
  • But many of the callers were hostile and confused, Rose said.
    Washington Post, 4 Jan. 2021
  • That division was shut down in the face of a failed hostile takeover from Broadcom.
    Ron Amadeo, Ars Technica, 19 Aug. 2022
  • Some are hostile, some are flighty, others are just dicks.
    Joshua Rivera, GQ, 29 Jan. 2018
  • Lula will also have to work with a much more hostile congress.
    Ian Bremmer, Time, 7 Nov. 2022
  • But their art was was made in a time when the world was even more hostile to female artists or female genius.
    Patrick Ryan, USA TODAY, 14 May 2021
  • Renters’ groups tended to be as hostile as anyone else.
    Eric Levitz, Daily Intelligencer, 21 Apr. 2018
  • Duke punched back in the second half, but the Cardinals held steady in front of a wild and hostile crowd.
    Lucas Aulbach, The Courier-Journal, 3 Apr. 2020
  • Chan said that some of the hostile rhetoric has already begun to seep into the election cycle.
    Kimmy Yam, NBC News, 28 Oct. 2023
  • Tang isn't the first person in the Phoenix area to be openly hostile to the self-driving fleet.
    Roberto Baldwin, Car and Driver, 14 Feb. 2020
  • My manager, the person who hired me, was hostile and rude to me three times in one day.
    Roxane Gay, New York Times, 28 Aug. 2021
  • Fifth, the government has been hostile to the private sector.
    Misheck Mutize, Quartz Africa, 5 Aug. 2020
  • Don’t speed and keep a bucket in the car to avoid having to stop at restrooms in hostile locations.
    Joe Guillen, Detroit Free Press, 27 Sep. 2020
  • And then to see our nation's capitol being stormed by hostile forces.
    NBC News, 21 Mar. 2021
  • If Comcast does make a hostile bid for Fox, there will be irony in it.
    The Economist, 17 Feb. 2018
  • But perhaps the most common form of hostile seating is even subtler: the utter lack of it in some places.
    Kurt Kohlstedt, Wired, 5 Oct. 2020
  • And this court appears likely to be hostile to racial justice remedies.
    Van Jones, CNN, 20 July 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'hostile.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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