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.

“We build stories and react to the stories that we build,” Kathryn T. Hall, the author of Placebos, and a professor at Harvard Medical School, told me.

From Slate • Jan. 7, 2024

The Doctors Placebos; toxic sunscreen; eyebrow lamination; longer lashes; mock-guac; dogfishing; sleep.

From Los Angeles Times • Feb. 2, 2020

Placebos work only if patients think they’re real.

From Washington Post • Feb. 19, 2016

Placebos aren’t just sugar pills disguised as medicine, though that’s the literal definition; they are any intervention, benign but believed by the recipient to be potent, that produces measurable physiological changes.

From New York Times • Oct. 22, 2014

These services derived the name under which they commonly went from one of the words of the liturgy sung; they were called Placebos and Diriges.

From A Literary History of the English People From the Origins to the Renaissance by Jusserand, Jean Jules