pigeonholing

verb

present participle of pigeonhole
as in categorizing
disapproving to unfairly think of or describe (someone or something) as belonging to only a certain category She likes to perform different types of music because she doesn't want to be pigeonholed.

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Example Sentences

Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
Recent Examples of pigeonholing Whether your perception of Gen Z is shaped by real-world interactions or two-dimensional headlines, pigeonholing a whole generation is reductive. — Alex Cooper, Fortune, 16 May 2026 McCurdy cautions against classifying Holiday as a blues singer and pigeonholing her into an age and culture. — Daniella Walsh, Oc Register, 21 Mar. 2026 The broader appeal and usefulness of the Dashaway eCT are just too dramatic to dedicate more time pigeonholing himself into a restrictive niche. — New Atlas, 28 Oct. 2025 Leibovitz has always resisted pigeonholing. — Y-Jean Mun-Delsalle, Forbes.com, 13 Aug. 2025
Recent Examples of Synonyms for pigeonholing
  1. categorizing
  2. classifying
  3. relegating
  4. separating
  5. identifying
Verb
  • Drawing on her background in cultural anthropology, Cathy Orr, cofounder of The Uncluttered Life, says grouping similar items is a natural inclination and that humans make sense of their environment by categorizing it.
    — Kate Van Pelt, The Spruce, 7 Nov. 2026
  • Attorney General Todd Blanche on Sunday rejected the idea that election monitors being deployed to polls during the midterm elections will be armed, categorizing the notion as fearmongering and false.
    — Claire Carter, The Washington Examiner, 4 Oct. 2026
Definition of categorizing
Verb
  • The prosecution argued that the victims — who all belonged to the church and had since left — delayed reporting the incidents or classifying them as rape due to fear of retaliation for violating a Scientology rule against going to the police.
    — Gene Maddaus, Variety, 27 Oct. 2026
  • Operators fed Maven intelligence classifying the elementary school as an Iranian military facility, and the system, in turn, marked it as one of the priority targets for day one of the war.
    — Kylie Jones, Vox, 25 Oct. 2026
Definition of classifying
Verb
  • Of course, other keyboard types were cheaper to produce, relegating Hall-effect keyboards to an afterthought for decades.
    — ArsTechnica, ArsTechnica, 5 Oct. 2026
  • However, relegating City to the second-tier Championship League would be a punishment that could hurt the rest of the league.
    — Kevin Baxter, Los Angeles Times, 29 Sep. 2026
Definition of relegating
Verb
  • There can also be, unfortunately, a splitting up of the household if parents are getting divorced or separating.
    — Austin Horn, Miami Herald, 12 Nov. 2026
  • The 12 rural counties that voted Tuesday to explore separating from Illinois have a combined population of just over 252,000 people, according to 2025 Census estimates, roughly 2% of Illinois’ population.
    — The Editorial Board, Chicago Tribune, 10 Nov. 2026
Definition of separating
Verb
  • OpenAI said the partnership would bring different expertise and approaches to identifying weaknesses.
    — Atharva Gosavi, Interesting Engineering, 3 Nov. 2026
  • The lawsuit says Brave crawled and copied content from more than 30 billion webpages in its index without identifying itself or providing the owners of websites any mechanism to block its crawler, according to the newspapers’ complaint.
    — Molly Crane Newman, The Orlando Sentinel, 2 Nov. 2026
Definition of identifying

Browse Nearby Words

pigeonholes
pigeonholing
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Cite this Entry

“Pigeonholing.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/pigeonholing. Accessed 14 Nov. 2026.

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