sweep aside

phrasal verb

swept aside; sweeping aside; sweeps aside
: to treat (something) as not important : to ignore (something)
He swept aside questions about his son's arrest.
He swept aside their objections, refusing to change his plans.

Examples of sweep aside in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web What this interpretation leaves out, according to Perl-Rosenthal, is that all the transatlantic revolutions began to unfold at an accelerating pace as the initial revolutionary vanguard was swept aside. Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker, 25 Mar. 2024 The last time parliamentary and presidential elections coincided was in 1964, when Britain’s Labour Party ousted the long-governing Conservatives in October, and less than a month later, a Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, swept aside a challenge from a right-wing Republican insurgent. Mark Landler, New York Times, 5 Jan. 2024 The tension remains, until the story needs it to be swept aside for a grander statement. David Fear, Rolling Stone, 6 Dec. 2023 Xi dealt with this resistance by giving his imprimatur to a reorganization that dismantled institutional and geographic power bases, swept aside superfluous personnel, enforced mandatory retirements, and extended the anticorruption campaign being waged across the greater CCP into the PLA. David M. Finkelstein, Foreign Affairs, 4 Oct. 2023 Congress will again need to fund the government in coming weeks risking a crisis as views are hardening, particularly among the right-flank lawmakers whose demands were ultimately swept aside this time in favor of a more bipartisan approach. Lisa Mascaro, Fortune, 1 Oct. 2023 Revolution is typically portrayed as the final act that the struggle has been building toward, as the old ways are swept aside in favor of a new and presumably glorious future. Catherine Bray, Variety, 6 Sep. 2023 The juntas that have swept aside the previous regimes have weaponized resentment of Paris’s deep and complicated imperial legacy, much to the opportunistic glee of Russia, which has offered both rhetorical and, in some instances, substantive support to the coup-plotting regimes. Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, 1 Sep. 2023 But the drastic transformation of Russia’s portrayal of Ukraine and the rest of the world illustrates Putin’s fierce determination to sweep aside the dark pages of Russia’s past and, quite literally, write himself into history as a victorious conqueror. Mary Ilyushina, Washington Post, 13 Aug. 2023

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

Dictionary Entries Near sweep aside

Cite this Entry

“Sweep aside.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sweep%20aside. Accessed 27 Apr. 2024.

Last Updated: - Updated example sentences
Love words? Need even more definitions?

Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free!