cloy
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:
I added horseradish and hot sauce for a kick, and just enough ketchup to tint the sauce pale pink without letting it cloy.
From Seattle Times ● May 29, 2023
For “West Side Story” he wrote “poetic” lyrics that Bernstein loved but that embarrassed their author — yet also produced, as the collaboration matured, lacerating lines that never cloy.
From New York Times ● Mar. 12, 2020
And whenever the cutesiness threatens to cloy, the script throws in a palate-cleansing taste of tart or bitter.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 11, 2014
What happened then, and I may have been two days in or three or five, I couldn’t really say, was that things began to cloy.
From The New Yorker ● Mar. 10, 2014
And I remember the smells of the hills, wild azalea and a very distant skunk and the sweet cloy of lupin and horse sweat on harness.
From "East of Eden" by John Steinbeck
The screen virtually overflows with computer-generated wizardry and cutesy flora and fauna, to a degree that cloys.
From Washington Post ● Oct. 15, 2019
Without stripping gears, she makes fast switches from explosive comedy to a sober emotionalism that never cloys.
From New York Times ● Apr. 20, 2017
In fact, if anything in “Olive and the Bitter Herbs” actually cloys, it is Olive’s own peevishness, strangely enough.
From New York Times ● Aug. 17, 2011
This sentiment seldom cloys because Ernest Truex gives the most serious, tender performance of his career and Marda Vanne as the wife never forgets restraint.
From Time Magazine Archive
Sweet meditation now my mind employs; A pleasure pure, and one which never cloys.
From Yorkshire Lyrics Poems written in the Dialect as Spoken in the West Riding of Yorkshire. To which are added a Selection of Fugitive Verses not in the Dialect by John Hartley
He envies the young for being young and for possessing the integrity that has eroded in him, the appetite for life that has cloyed on his palate, and the courage that has been drowned.
From Time Magazine Archive
If this cloyed on Holmes, he never gave a sign; he was obviously having too much fun watching Laski's continuous intellectual floor show.
From Time Magazine Archive
Her formula, a combination of hard masculine realism with feminine deftness and sympathy, pleased many a post-War reader cloyed with hard-boiled sentimentality.
From Time Magazine Archive
Appetites already cloyed by the night’s heat were further diminished.
From "Atonement" by Ian McEwan
This will prevent their being cloyed, and will hasten the fattening process.
From The American Reformed Cattle Doctor by George Dadd
Such a cloying tone from the queen of bitterness!
From Slate ● May 6, 2026
Not cloying, not milky, not trying to be liked by everyone at the bake sale.
From Salon ● Mar. 5, 2026
In its all-too-human view of life, this is, entertainingly, whatever the opposite of a cloying graduation speech is.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 20, 2026
Working with a decent if cloying screenplay by Joe Anders, Winslet aims to capture all of the intimate moments and outsized chaos that large families are prone to weaving between.
From Salon ● Jan. 1, 2026
The room smelled of sickness, a cloying odor made up in equal parts of stale sweat and medicine.
From "A Clash of Kings" by George R.R. Martin
