How to Use pidgin in a Sentence
pidgin
noun-
The children speak in a sort of wise and frightening pidgin.
—Literary Hub, 10 Feb. 2026
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But the effect is as vivid as the sassy, strong-willed narrator’s pidgin.
—Tsitsi Dangarembga, New York Times, 28 Feb. 2020
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The tree, called Nagafika in the local pidgin, was on the property when Aipen acquired it five years ago.
—Christopher Elliott, Forbes.com, 23 May 2026
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Blending several local languages and named after a mixed fruit salad, the pidgin can often be heard in places like street markets.
—Beh Lih Yi, The Christian Science Monitor, 3 Nov. 2020
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Hapa is a Hawaiian pidgin word used to describe mixed-race people (usually those who are half Asian and half white).
—Danielle M. Wong, Harper's BAZAAR, 17 Oct. 2017
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Many cats and their human companions seem to develop a pidgin language in order to communicate better.
—National Geographic, 28 Mar. 2016
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Ed Sheeran takes over the second verse with lyrics peppered with upbeat pidgin and interlaced with words from Yoruba which forms the lyrics of the original song.
—Nelson C.j., Rolling Stone, 27 Dec. 2021
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Sometimes her Native American characters speak a cigar-store pidgin to one another, only to drop it further down on the same page.
—William T. Vollmann, New York Times, 17 June 2016
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Epstein’s pidgin writing style, paired with his name-dropping and vagueness, makes emails like this excellent fodder for both speculation and genuine concern.
—Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic, 14 Nov. 2025
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Namaste Wahala' loosely translates to 'Hello trouble' and it is filmed in a mix of Hindu and Nigeria's pidgin language.
—Aisha Salaudeen, CNN, 24 Feb. 2020
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Speaking in a pidgin of French and English, and switching back and forth sometimes within the same sentence, Delphine's story comes out in jagged rambles, which are often heartbreaking.
—Piers Marchant, Arkansas Online, 21 May 2021
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ClayRocksU excels at something similar, fusing Igbo language and local pidgin folk elements with punk rock.
—Ama Udofa, Rolling Stone, 19 June 2022
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The creoles emerged from a first-contact language or pidgin resulting from the contact between the Portuguese colonizers and the slaves from the kingdom of Benin in Sao Tome.
—Uwagbale Edward-Ekpu, Quartz, 23 July 2021
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As with his totemic travel writing, exotic settings and a flair for adventure invigorate the otherwise workmanlike prose, and the scenes flash with surfer’s lingo, snatches of Hawaiian pidgin and odes to the ocean.
—Sam Sacks, WSJ, 7 May 2021
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American English is meant to grow wild and woolly on our shores, spawning dialects and pidgins, wantonly consuming foreign words and locutions, anarchically legitimizing slang and warped grammar.
—Virginia Heffernan, WIRED, 28 June 2018
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Japanese immigrants who worked in pineapple fields and on sugarcane plantations introduced their ice-cold kakigori to Hawaii in the late 1800s, where it became known as shave ice in Hawaiian pidgin.
—Omar Mamoon, Janelle Bitker, San Francisco Chronicle, 14 Sep. 2021
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But Amazon expects this person to be well connected with the Nigerian film industry, already boasting relationships with top creators, fluency in Nigerian pidgin and one or more indigenous languages.
—Alexander Onukwue, Quartz, 11 Apr. 2022
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Fontana would write dialogue for the character in American vernacular, and Akinnuoye-Agbaje would translate it into Nigerian pidgin.
—Molly Lambert, Vulture, 20 Apr. 2026
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'pidgin.' 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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