\ ˈē-(ˌ)mō
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Definition of emo
: a style of rock music influenced by punk rock and featuring introspective and emotionally fraught lyrics
In emo, the heart forever hurts, and the ultra-introspective songwriter pines for beautiful death.— Robert Sullivan
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Examples of emo in a Sentence
Recent Examples on the Web
The beef was that punk kids thought the emo kids were copping their style and essentially started beating them up.
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Fidel Martinez, Los Angeles Times, "Latinx Files: ‘An educational pandemic’ for English learners in California schools," 8 Apr. 2021
But Lee rose above that wan world of bellyaching and bad facial hair like a mythic beast, thanks to her enormous vocal power and messy, fresh-faced emo-goth charisma.
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Jon Dolan, Rolling Stone, "Evanescence Search for Goth-Metal Meaning on ‘The Bitter Truth’," 7 Apr. 2021
All that pressure is enough to make any Muppet a little bit emo, and Kermit is no exception.
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Rebecca Caplan, Vulture, "Muppets, Ranked," 26 Mar. 2021
In a meeting at Columbia four days after XXXTentacion was killed, there was talk of concocting a collaboration between the two late emo-rap stars.
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Sheldon Pearce, The New Yorker, "The Perils of the Posthumous Rap Album," 11 Mar. 2021
The movie sees Fenix pushed around and negged by his jock nemesis — played by the TikTok star turned emo-rapper Jxdn, aka Jaden Hossler — until Fenix’s garage band makes an impressive debut at a local dive bar, earning him the respect of his peers.
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Los Angeles Times, "How Chase Hudson, TikTok heartthrob, became Lil Huddy, snarling pop-punk rocker," 4 Mar. 2021
Smudgy black eyeliner was the defining look of pop punk and emo music (hello, Avril Lavigne), but also a staple for party girls like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton and fictitious bad girls like Skins' Effy Stonem and Gossip Girl's Jenny Humphrey.
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Bella Cacciatore, Glamour, "Like It or Not, Smudgy Black Eyeliner Is Back," 3 Mar. 2021
Today that album is universally regarded as an emo classic.
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Los Angeles Times, "It’s not ‘Pinkerton.’ But Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo gets pretty emo on ‘OK Human’," 26 Jan. 2021
The track takes pop, hip-hop, emo and screamo all into its stride for an intense trip into a wild night out in Paris.
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Stephen Daw, Billboard, "First Out: New Music From Ashnikko, Shamir, Perfume Genius & More," 15 Jan. 2021
See MoreThese example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'emo.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
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12 Apr 2021
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Cite this Entry
“Emo.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/emo. Accessed 17 Apr. 2021.
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Time Traveler for emo
The first known use of emo was in 1988
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