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 sententious This conclusion will shock anyone who knows Twain only through his writing, in which the author is wise and witty and, above all, devastating in his portrayal of frauds, cretins, and sententious bores. Graeme Wood, The Atlantic, 9 May 2025 Audiences have no choice but to exist in the theatrical moment, without recourse to linear logic, sententious language or psychological epiphanies. Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times, 16 Mar. 2025 This is a bracing, even novel, perspective on a war whose film depictions so often traffic in sententious Greatest Generation platitudes. Justin Chang, The New Yorker, 25 Oct. 2024 Without the wit inherent in an epigram, a sententious formulation becomes a mere adage, aphorism, apothegm, gnome, maxim, or saw. Bryan A. Garner, National Review, 15 Sep. 2022 Instead each event—from lethal accidents to vicious murders to Category 5 hurricanes—is immediately sorted into its prelabeled moral narrative file, each one full of similarly useful sententious parables. Gerard Baker, WSJ, 30 May 2022
Recent Examples of Synonyms for sententious
Adjective
  • McVey, 28, has reaped a personal bonus from the concise coaching: he’s been freed up to develop his game by not having to direct traffic as much.
    Tom Krasovic, San Diego Union-Tribune, 28 Aug. 2025
  • Then draft a concise, personalized cover letter highlighting my strongest fit points.
    Caroline Castrillon, Forbes.com, 26 Aug. 2025
Adjective
  • The speech marked the foundation of an independent Vietnam after nearly a century of French colonial rule and a brief Japanese occupation during World War II, but the French did not recognise the new country and fought a decade-long war, which ended with their defeat in 1954.
    Phuong Nguyen, USA Today, 3 Sep. 2025
  • In brief, the basic issue is the Second Amendment in a secular country.
    Chicago Tribune, Chicago Tribune, 3 Sep. 2025
Adjective
  • Not surprisingly, given the risk of summary execution, many had initial doubts.
    Yossi Melman, ProPublica, 7 Aug. 2025
  • The young man risked beatings that would end in summary execution for sneaking in extra food to prisoners who were supposed to be the empire’s work-and-starve-to-death slaves.
    Charles Pellegrino, Rolling Stone, 6 Aug. 2025
Adjective
  • Such subtlety may not necessarily be what readers—perhaps American readers, in particular—expect from political fiction, which can have a reputation for being didactic and heavy-handed, designed to beat readers over the head, as if anything political were made in the mode of Soviet realism.
    Lily Meyer, The Atlantic, 5 Sep. 2025
  • At the level of craft, writers and executive producers Fellowes and Sonja Warfield didn’t feel the need to get didactic in the script.
    Rebecca Alter, Vulture, 14 July 2025
Adjective
  • The experience proved uniquely instructive.
    Todd Gilchrist, Variety, 4 Sep. 2025
  • Truman’s tension with the Fed The experiences of the 1950s are especially instructive to understanding the importance of preserving the independence of the Fed.
    Robert Hormats, Time, 3 Sep. 2025
Adjective
  • His disdain for the brothers’ moralistic literary choices was clear.
    Time, Time, 23 July 2025
  • Intervention by authorities has Indian moviegoers fuming, who accuse the censors of making moralistic changes while adopting a double standard for Bollywood films, which are often laced with innuendos, misogyny and sensual scenes.
    Mithil Aggarwal, NBC news, 16 July 2025

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Cite this Entry

“Sententious.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/sententious. Accessed 9 Sep. 2025.

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