How to Use subhuman in a Sentence

subhuman

1 of 2 adjective

• The prisoners suffered subhuman treatment.
• Many Black migrants are pushed to the fringes of border cities to wait in subhuman conditions.
  — Arelis R. Hernández, Washington Post, 11 Mar. 2023
• The president is proof that a subhuman nonthinking white man can one day become the leader of the free world.
  — Stephen A. Crockett Jr., The Root, 28 Feb. 2018
• At the same time, a loop seemed to start playing in my mind, with hundreds of voices from my past telling me that transgender people were subhuman.
  — Lara Americo, New York Times, 15 Apr. 2020
• This is a common theme of white supremacy -- reducing nonwhites to a subhuman level through language.
  — John Blake, CNN, 17 Aug. 2019
• The campaign was threaded with a drumbeat suggestion that homeless people are a subhuman plague.
  — Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board, Orlando Sentinel, 17 Mar. 2025
• The stars and stripes wave over a vast concentration camp that houses ape slaves in subsimian, never mind subhuman, conditions.
  — Joe Morgenstern, WSJ, 13 July 2017
• All around her, in the heart of Hollywood, people were living in subhuman conditions, sprawled beside storefronts and at bus stops.
  — Steve Lopezcolumnist, Los Angeles Times, 4 Oct. 2019
• The individuals and groups committing these acts are subhuman.
  — Bobby Zirkin, Baltimore Sun, 24 Feb. 2025
• Africans were enslaved because of their low cost, subhuman status, and agricultural skills, Williams-Forson said.
  — Lateshia Beachum, Washington Post, 24 Aug. 2019
• Slaves, by contrast, were considered property, a subhuman legal status that was passed from mother to child, in perpetuity.
  — Eoin O'Carroll, The Christian Science Monitor, 16 Mar. 2018
• The couple allegedly kept their 13 children in subhuman conditions.
  — Matt Naham, ajc, 24 Jan. 2018
• Genocides throughout history have involved the victims being compared to something subhuman.
  — Katy Steinmetz, Time, 18 May 2018
• In the Trumpian universe, immigrants pose a superhuman threat but are themselves of subhuman significance.
  — Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, 5 July 2019
• The widespread belief that Africans were not fully human, but rather subhuman, propped up the Confederacy’s defense of itself.
  — Sarah Jones, The New Republic, 20 June 2018
• The subhuman invaders, as Raspail describes them, wallow in their own feces and delight in trampling over the misguided liberals who thought to welcome and feed them.
  — Katherine Stewart, The New Republic, 10 Aug. 2023
• Others, including Gali, say the term took on a darker tone that denigrates Native women, relegating them to a subhuman stature.
  — Melissa Gomez, Los Angeles Times, 30 Jan. 2024
• Even more a part of this notion is the assumption that journalists, reporters, and editors are subhuman and expected to be on the periphery of the human experience.
  — Sara Li, Teen Vogue, 6 Mar. 2020
• Yet new science is showing that Neanderthals weren't subhuman so much as other than human, living alongside us for many years in Europe, even interbreeding.
  — Steve Johnson, chicagotribune.com, 6 July 2017
• Americans are also prone, surveys suggest, to find their subhuman opponents extremely disagreeable.
  — The Economist, 24 May 2018
• The history of immigration policy is filled with moments like these, when a group goes from subhuman to superhuman within a few short years, because of political winds beyond their grasp.
  — Hua Hsu, The New Yorker, 15 Feb. 2017
• In 2017, in Alabama, there are public high schools named after men who thought people with darker skin than themselves were subhuman and needed to be slaves forever.
  — Joseph Goodman, AL.com, 25 May 2017
• Here’s just one component — research shows that the perception of black people as subhuman and ape-like directly informs the public’s view of whether police brutality against a black suspect is deserved.
  — Ellen McGirt, Fortune, 31 May 2018
• Modern history is full of examples of political regimes that has described certain populations as subhuman—often to justify treating them as such.
  — Sarah Jones, The New Republic, 20 June 2018
• Perhaps an entire information industry will be devoted to marginalizing them and calling them Nazis and reducing them to subhuman status.
  — John Kass, chicagotribune.com, 12 Sep. 2019
• Germans used the word Untermenschen, which literally means subhuman, to describe Jews while making plans to exterminate them.
  — Katy Steinmetz, Time, 18 May 2018
• Pronouncing whole categories of people as subhuman numbs a nation’s moral sense and, in extreme but, unfortunately, too many cases, becomes a rationale for collective cruelty.
  — Eugene Scott, Washington Post, 21 May 2018
• His agencies have dehumanized and abused migrants, forcing them into subhuman conditions without accountability or oversight.
  — Charlie Lapastora, Fox News, 16 Aug. 2019
• Yet today’s LLMs are distinctly subhuman in their ability to absorb and understand large quantities of information.
  — Ars Technica, 20 Dec. 2024
• When committed by terrorists, criminals, or protesters, violence is horrific, and its perpetrators are subhuman.
  — Peter Beinart, The Atlantic, 20 Oct. 2017

subhuman

2 of 2 noun

• Anyone that is in country music and had to look at that bulls— today and feel subhuman.
  — Ashley Iasimone, Billboard, 27 Aug. 2022
• Something subhuman—weaker, stranger, more destructive than the rest of us.
  — Josie Duffy Rice, The Atlantic, 12 July 2018
• The South fired the first shots of the Civil War out of greed, hatred, and a mass delusion that blacks were subhumans who were destined to serve whites.
  — Solomon Jones, Philly.com, 31 Oct. 2017
• Classes at school did not teach me about the internment of Japanese-Americans, nor about all of the rest of the groups deemed subhuman.
  — TheWeek, 6 Aug. 2020
• Extremist stories may claim that a group is under attack, that outsiders are dangerous or subhuman, or that violence is the only way to stay safe.
  — Yu-Ru Lin, The Conversation, 7 May 2026
• Initially, the oppressors declared that only Christians had a soul; everyone else was subhuman and could be treated as such.
  — Keith Magee, CNN, 17 May 2022
• These descriptions aligned with the treatment of Black people’s bodies during the slave trade, where they were deemed both subhuman and at the same time having superhuman strength.
  — USA Today, 1 Oct. 2020
• Criminalizing black men and deeming them subhuman, more akin to beasts in the field than white men, served to justify the brutality they were dealt, Yancy said.
  — Eliott C. McLaughlin, CNN, 3 June 2020
• In the adrenaline spike of a tough beat, a bettor loses perspective; the athlete becomes a subhuman extra in the gambler’s personal drama.
  — Mckay Coppins, The Atlantic, 12 Mar. 2026
• The voyages were planned with conditions so indelibly subhuman that deportees would never again want to return to the United States.
  — Julia Preston, The New York Review of Books, 22 Sep. 2020
• These families are vulnerable, seeking safety and asylum, but they’re being treated like subhumans.
  — Patrick Marley, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 25 June 2018
• Instead, people with viruses are represented as reckless, dangerous, and subhuman.
  — Melissa Gira Grant, The New Republic, 6 Sep. 2022
• Here in the United States, by contrast, the enslaved were relegated to subhuman status for generations.
  — Julian Lucas, The New Yorker, 16 Sep. 2022
• Another friend was an evangelical pastor who grew up in the Jim Crow South believing that Black people were subhuman.
  — John Blake, CNN Money, 26 Oct. 2025
• But Myanmar’s Buddhist majority drove them out in the first place, creating a climate of hate that vilified the Rohingya as subhuman.
  — Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times, 3 Nov. 2017
• In their eyes, the Eldians are a stand-in for white people in Western countries, punished for the crimes of their ancestors’ empires and besieged by subhuman monsters trying to enter their land.
  — Shaan Amin, The New Republic, 16 Nov. 2020
• But even past that, Tactics is directly about how the rich and powerful view the poor and weak as almost subhuman, practically delighting in the squalor and suffering normal people go through.
  — Hayes Madsen, Rolling Stone, 24 Sep. 2025
• And the seriousness is an important part of the story, which, in large part, is about magic-wielding people who have been enslaved and are viewed as subhuman so that the populace is okay with using them like tools to support the kingdom.
  — Andrew Webster, The Verge, 22 June 2023
• The brawl, which Ah Sahm wins handily, is the kind of thing that a nonwhite person fantasizes about after being treated as subhuman—a kick-ass solution to a miasmic attack.
  — Jasper Lo, The New Yorker, 12 Sep. 2023
• Before the judge formally sentenced Cruz in November, victims’ families spent two days berating him as evil, a coward, a monster and a subhuman who deserves a painful death.
  — Freida Frisaro, Sun Sentinel, 19 Jan. 2023
• Tuesday’s change broadens the hate speech rule to forbid likening entire religious groups to subhumans or vermin, without targeting a specific individual.
  — Washington Post, 9 July 2019
• Only this farm belongs to Frank’s brother (David Andrew Nash), who exists only to make the point that today’s immigrant workers are also treated as subhuman.
  — Amy Nicholson, Variety, 23 Jan. 2022
• That incredibly deep insight explains why all women who can't experience the miracle of birth or motherhood automatically transform into subhuman troglodytes.
  — Jeremy Hsu, Discover Magazine, 22 Apr. 2016
• The labor movement undertook two fights, resisting workers being displaced by machines but also resisting workers being treated as machines, subhuman fodder fuelling technological progress.
  — Kyle Chayka, New Yorker, 8 Apr. 2026
• Both Armenia and Azerbaijan have marshaled musicians, Twitter and Facebook partisans, officials and lobbyists to trumpet their cause and paint the other side as subhuman killers.
  — Nabih Bulos, Los Angeles Times, 10 Nov. 2020
• That assessment hit the newsstands one day after New York state troopers and other authorities gunned down 39 men in the facility’s main yard, terminating a five-day uprising ignited by subhuman, racist conditions.
  — Washington Post, 6 Oct. 2021
• Since then, each subsequent disaster has unveiled another facet of the social safety net’s inadequacies as stories about Puerto Rico’s elderly living in subhuman conditions become frequent segments of local newscasts and tabloids.
  — Arelis R. Hernández, Washington Post, 13 Jan. 2023
• In particular, when politicians use demonizing or dehumanizing rhetoric to attack their opponents— for example, using words that depict their opponents as subhuman— this fosters extremism and helps motivate extremists to hurt their opponents physically.
  — James Piazza, Twin Cities, 30 Apr. 2026