How to Use referent in a Sentence

referent

noun

• There’s the referent; that’s the raccoon.
  — Kory Stamper, Longreads, 19 Mar. 2026
• And this isn't just the case for white people who are willing to stomach racist referents.
  — Leah Donnella, NPR, 18 May 2024
• On a metal album, even the ugliest sounds tend to have some earthly referent.
  — Brad Sanders, Pitchfork, 8 June 2026
• There’s a sense of theater which the public lives off and needs to a certain extent, to have referents.
  — Pablo Sandoval, Variety, 13 Dec. 2023
• Just to use a word is to acknowledge the absence of its referent, as though language itself makes loss our theme and medium.
  — Matthew Gavin Frank, Harper's Magazine, 21 June 2023
• Like most graphical widgets, tabs are metaphors whose referent has been largely forgotten.
  — Meghan O'Gieblyn, WIRED, 28 Mar. 2023
• The other half is constructed with the memories, longing, referents, et cetera, of the readers’ lives.
  — Kathleen Rooney, chicagotribune.com, 8 Oct. 2019
• The potential metaphoric referents here quickly become clear, and are likely to vary by the viewer.
  — Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune, 2 Mar. 2026
• This is very unlikely to happen in the sonic dimension, because sound is ambiguous in respect with its referent.
  — Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader, 16 Apr. 2018
• Framing is an opportunity to break the tremendous power of the image in relation to its referent.
  — Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader, 16 Apr. 2018
• Help new executives identify the referent points, the people who others defer to and follow.
  — Joe Frodsham, Forbes, 3 Sep. 2024
• Here, from a twenty-three-year-old, was a new tone in the language, a different way of saying, pushing back against expectations of rhythm and syntax and referent.
  — Nick Laird, The New York Review of Books, 16 Mar. 2023
• Then there’s the gutting ending, which is about oblivion, how everything disappears, including our referents.
  — John Hopewell, Variety, 14 Oct. 2025
• Too many college students were never taught the basic referents of liberal education.
  — Victor Davis Hanson, The Mercury News, 4 May 2017
• In a pronoun resolution problem, the examples are ones that involve common sense in order to disambiguate the referent of the pronoun.
  — IEEE Spectrum, 28 July 2016
• Nyerere even made the term Swahili a referent to Tanzanian citizenship.
  — John M. Mugane, Quartz, 5 Apr. 2022
• Atop the frame balance an apple and one of Crivelli’s mysterious green vegetables, which looks like an emoji for which the referent has been forgotten.
  — Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker, 9 June 2022
• The question involves determining the referent of the pronoun or possessive adjective.
  — IEEE Spectrum, 19 Jan. 2015
• There are hundreds of millions of people who understand this tweet, and understood its referents on every other social platform in 2018.
  — Kaitlyn Tiffany, Vox, 20 Dec. 2018
• Of course, the typical symbolic referent for the Stranger is Death or Change or God — those pesky, perennial, uninvited guests.
  — Helen Shaw, Vulture, 23 June 2022
• That black Americans have a month set aside to honor them — outside of a white lens that has often framed them as criminal, negligent, or unworthy of historical referent — isn’t racist against anyone.
  — Jenn M. Jackson, Teen Vogue, 6 Feb. 2018
• The advent of social media has turned nearly every photograph into an opinion that can be refuted, rather than a referent establishing the visible facts of a situation.
  — Vogue, 12 Sep. 2022
• Academics and conceptual artists quivered with excitement after the news broke—referent, context, appropriation, etc.
  — Hernan Diaz, Harper’s Magazine , 10 Feb. 2023
• That song, with its Dickensian referent, sets up the central character’s hopes and dreams, but the show never again reaches those emotional heights, neither narratively or musically.
  — Chris Jones, New York Daily News, 11 Apr. 2024
• As the series builds, one suspicion is that the real referent of its title is to a rational mindset born of the Enlightenment buoyed by scientific progress which, until very recently was held to be the answer to everyone’s problems.
  — John Hopewell, Variety, 27 June 2022