brutalize
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Whether or not he decides to appear at the trial, scheduled to begin later this year, the A.G. can use his videoed deposition testimony to brutalize him the same way Carroll’s lawyers did.
From Slate ● May 11, 2023
Specifically, a few decades of drought pushed the Huns to the brink, forcing them to brutalize others in pursuit of survival.
From Salon ● Dec. 24, 2022
“A White House job is not a promise of an unlimited prerogative to brutalize someone who was a victim of a prior attack,” attorney Joshua Matz said.
From Seattle Times ● Dec. 3, 2021
Let us hope that Taliban leaders mean it when they say they will not brutalize the population as they did before.
From Washington Post ● Aug. 17, 2021
The weight of the sand began to brutalize her shoulders.
From "The Princess Bride" by William Goldman
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Any overacting brutalizes Cheever's prose; mugging is the artistic equivalent of a mugging.
From Time Magazine Archive
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And cold, cold day and night, cold that brutalizes, that degenerates you till you would sell your soul, your mother's soul to be warm again.
From Home Fires in France by Dorothy Canfield
A sophist is a forger, and this forger sometimes brutalizes good sense.
From The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo
It is not the Creator who so brutalizes lives and emotions.
From Highland Ballad by Christopher Leadem
Frugality, in fact, softens character, in animals as in men; gross feeding brutalizes it.
From The Wonders of Instinct Chapters in the Psychology of Insects by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
This is not the first time I have encountered a situation where the hapless staff find themselves brutalized by loud, idiotic, or culturally discordant music.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 15, 2025
This is about as much of a review of “All’s Fair” worth venturing at this point, since pretty much every critic has brutalized the show.
From Salon ● Nov. 6, 2025
And while the Cavs blitzed the Lakers from three early, it was their transition and interior defense that ended up getting most brutalized.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 30, 2024
When, in the mid-20th century, President Dwight Eisenhower’s “mighty network of highways” spread its tentacles across the landscape, it brutalized nature.
From Slate ● May 25, 2024
“Malcolm X’s decision to enter the mainstream of the straggle heralds a hopeful sign on the sickeningly dismal scene of brutalized, non-violent, passive resistance. ...”
From "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" by Alex Malcolm X;Hailey
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Dahlia Lithwick: These were incredibly consequential gut punches, two more in a long sequence of brutalizing cases.
From Slate ● Jun. 25, 2026
The central deviation is that this “Speak No Evil,” with its more pronounced humor and catharsis, treats the other film’s scenario as a ghastly comedy of manners rather than as a brutalizing, unheroic descent.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 12, 2024
Los Angeles built off the momentum, brutalizing Arizona with eight straight designed runs to start off a 75-yard touchdown drive to open the third quarter.
From Washington Times ● Oct. 16, 2023
Levinson is perhaps not enough of a formalist to fully convey, assuming any film could, the combined visceral and mental toll professional boxing must have taken on a man haunted by brutalizing his comrades.
From New York Times ● Apr. 27, 2022
Three thousand children crowded into this ugly brutalizing school that had facilities for only one thousand.
From "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith
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