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
Like his songs, he is funny, urbane, with a sweetness that doesn’t cloy.
From New York Times ● Oct. 8, 2019
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
It's a fairy-tale setup, but Sachar gives his characters real emotions and real problems, and the result is a surprisingly wise book that never cloys or condescends.
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
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
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
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
I was not dazzled by excess of artificial light, nor cloyed by spiced and sweetened sentiments.
From Margaret Fuller (Marchesa Ossoli) by Julia Ward Howe
Toiling around the clock, haggard Indonesian firefighters on Borneo island cannot keep up with the blazes devouring landscapes and shrouding communities in a cloying haze.
From Barron's ● Sep. 6, 2026
Such a cloying tone from the queen of bitterness!
From Slate ● May 6, 2026
Heartfelt without being cloying, this ad gets all the elements of its message of coming together right in ways that a similar ad from Spectrum couldn’t quite match.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 8, 2026
I have always found “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” the theme song from the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” to be both musically and lyrically cloying.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 5, 2026
It was no cleaner here, and in fact file air was even harder to breathe than in the cell, because all the natural stinks had been overlaid by a heavy layer of cloying perfume.
From "The Golden Compass" by Philip Pullman
