How to Use rivalrous in a Sentence

rivalrous

adjective

• Highways are clearly rivalrous, as anyone who has been in a traffic jam can attest.
  — Dominic Pino, National Review, 13 June 2021
• As with many rivalrous neighbors, however, the root causes of the feud run far deeper.
  — New York Times, 4 Nov. 2021
• His White House became one of the most rivalrous in history, chaotic and leak-prone.
  — Tevi Troy, WSJ, 2 Jan. 2021
• That means turn off the TV, give their phone a rest, and even maintain some space between siblings if things tend to get rivalrous.
  — Boone Ashworth, Wired, 18 May 2020
• After university, his rise was swift, and deeply alarming to a rivalrous father.
  — Parul Sehgal, New York Times, 20 Oct. 2020
• But on campus, where students were studying Sunday for final exams, the news was greeted by many with rivalrous pride.
  — Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Nicholas Fandos, New York Times, 1 May 2016
• But as was the rivalrous custom, their departments set up separate command centers, blocks from each other.
  — New York Times, 14 May 2020
• In the notoriously rivalrous world of car design, there’s little agreement about what that soundscape should be.
  — Time, 6 Apr. 2021
• Wiles and Vonn are both teammates and competitors, but the dynamic is more uplifting than rivalrous.
  — Sierra Shafer, Outside, 18 Nov. 2025
• Or when a rivalrous bet gone wrong resulted in a UK fan hopping in a pool in 40-degree weather.
  — Hayes Gardner, The Courier-Journal, 27 Nov. 2021
• As such, those fatally rivalrous street gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, have probably never loomed larger.
  — Ben Brantley, New York Times, 20 Feb. 2020
• Xi Jinping, that appeared to ease the rancorous rhetoric between the two increasingly rivalrous economies, the world’s largest.
  — Katie Rogers, New York Times, 16 Nov. 2022
• Many of the game's participants know members of the opposing team from other tournaments or showcases; that creates a bit of a rivalrous tone.
  — Special To The Oregonian, OregonLive.com, 13 Apr. 2018
• But most of the series’ time is spent mining the power differentials among the (largely white) elite, from warring spouses to squabbling siblings to rivalrous besties.
  — Los Angeles Times, 18 July 2021
• Every great day is like every other, all the Barbies are sparkling and chipper, and the Kens in this world are their rivalrous, doe-eyed admirers.
  — Peter Rainer, The Christian Science Monitor, 20 July 2023
• That quartet tracked the rivalrous friendship of two women, Lila and Lenù, from girlhood to old age, and seemed the sort of opus one writes to punctuate the end of a career.
  — The Atlantic Culture Desk, The Atlantic, 24 Dec. 2020
• The monkey business is dominated by a handful of highly secretive and rivalrous brokers.
  — Ava Kofman, New Yorker, 3 Nov. 2025
• But with the rivalrous spirit that has characterized the race to build a quantum computer, IBM cast doubt on Google’s claim.
  — Yaacov Benmeleh, Fortune, 1 Dec. 2020
• The kings were a rivalrous bunch — each built his own city in a bid to outdo his predecessor — and Koh Ker’s pyramid is a mammoth version of Rong Chen.
  — Simon Willis, Travel + Leisure, 21 Feb. 2023
• But the broader fact of the matter was that this was a watershed event for women’s basketball, a burgeoning that was far more important than any rivalrous sniping on Twitter.
  — Sally Jenkins, Anchorage Daily News, 3 Apr. 2023
• That would appear to put the wheels in place for a rivalrous battle between household names who are polar opposites, allowing for two very different meditations on the nature of success.
  — David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter, 10 Sep. 2017
• The translation into Hindi inevitably fails; instead, two fabulously different, almost rivalrous texts sit next to each other.
  — James Wood, The New Yorker, 1 Apr. 2024
• Easy enough for knights and their steeds to turn up as helicopters and corporate jets, and easy too for irascible media emperor Henry Dunbar and his rivalrous deputies to stand in for contentious king and court.
  — Cynthia Ozick, New York Times, 25 Oct. 2017
• These teams — there are precisely two in the series, vaguely rivalrous, unequally enlightened — are the tough who get going when the going gets too tough for the ordinary weapons and tactics of ordinary police officers.
  — Robert Lloyd, latimes.com, 2 Nov. 2017
• The invasions of Greece by the Persians forced rivalrous city-states, even Athens and Sparta, to unite against an outsider, and the tenuous unity produced a miraculous win.
  — James Romm, WSJ, 27 Sep. 2022
• The rivalrous power dynamic between Jones and frontman Jagger is captured in brilliant subtlety in the glances between them during an impromptu interview.
  — Sheri Linden, The Hollywood Reporter, 6 Nov. 2023
• In the show’s first three seasons, the relationship between the two characters is by turns rivalrous, affectionate, hostile, conspiratorial, and codependent.
  — Rebecca Mead, New Yorker, 8 Dec. 2025
• The fan-favorite wrestling drama that paired Stephen Amell and Alexander Ludwig as rivalrous bros went peering off a cliff less than two months ago before its unceremonious cancellation.
  — Starz Turns Heels, Vulture, 6 Nov. 2023
• Rather, they were lured ever deeper into the empire by rivalrous emperors and generals, who disbursed treasure (often gained from the plunder of Roman provinces) and ceded taxable land in return for military support.
  — Peter Brown, The New York Review of Books, 24 Sep. 2020
• The rivalrous duels between Larry Bird and Magic Johnson will forever be immortalized by basketball savants.
  — Carl Lamarre, Billboard, 9 Aug. 2017