ad-lib
Example Sentences
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Payne could virtuosically ad-lib live through the bridge of “Summer Love” or hit piercing high notes on a cover of Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 1, 2024
It has a pantomime theatricality to it, featuring shots of the audience and including moments when the actors corpse - a term used to describe breaking character and laughing - and ad-lib on stage.
From BBC ● Oct. 15, 2024
The speech isn’t something he can ad-lib or pull from memory, hence the notes, and he’d never use a PowerPoint presentation.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 20, 2024
Whether this comment is a favored ad-lib or something his speechwriters cooked up, it needs to go, immediately.
From Slate ● Feb. 9, 2024
Kids wouldn’t move to the right places during rehearsals, or would ad-lib wisecracks, which Mrs. Finley didn’t think at all funny.
From "Bad Boy" by Walter Dean Myers
Baron Samedi, a shadowy cane-wielding, top-hatted Haitian voodoo figure, slips in and out of the hubbub, with Leonardo Brito’s performance feeling more ad-libbed by the dancer than astutely choreographed by Ms. García.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 30, 2025
When asked to explain the court’s “shadow docket”, she ad-libbed a hypothetical all but identical to Monday’s real decision.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 10, 2025
“I was too young to be in the Senate,” he then ad-libbed in a joke, “and too old to be the president.”
From Slate ● Aug. 20, 2024
But not just any communication: an informal, minute-by-minute written down substitution for what might otherwise have been said out loud ad-libbed remarks, lost to the ether moments after their utterance.
From BBC ● Oct. 30, 2023
Using an outline updating the 1938 script, the station’s deejay and news reporters ad-libbed eyewitness accounts of a Martian attack.
From "Spooked!" by Gail Jarrow
Last time the World Cup came to these shores, in 1994, the draw was held in Las Vegas and Robin Williams stole the show by ad-libbing on stage.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 5, 2025
And Jean is somebody who there isn’t really a lot of ad-libbing.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 8, 2024
The Fijians have always been everyone’s favorite longshots at the Rugby World Cup due to the way they play, an inventive, ad-libbing attack-from-anywhere kind of ethos.
From Washington Times ● Sep. 18, 2023
“You look like a fallen constellation,” she told the crowd, ad-libbing some poetry.
From New York Times ● Jun. 11, 2023
They talk about their parts, sometimes even ad-libbing lines that are not in the script.
From "Drama High" by Michael Sokolove
Vocabulary lists containing ad-lib
Reading: Literature - Drama - Introductory
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Theater - Introductory
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Reading: Literature - Drama - Middle School
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