syncopate
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.
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Most of the songs vamp through a handful of chords as Keys gives her voice room to leap, to curl, to muse, to syncopate; she has rarely sounded so jazzy and improvisatory.
From New York Times ● Dec. 10, 2021
Not many, but enough to start infecting celebrations with doubt, to break up the exact time, the exact place, to syncopate something that used to be whole.
From The New Yorker ● Nov. 2, 2019
During a show-pausing turn in “Mary Poppins Returns,” Lin-Manuel Miranda takes center stage to sing and syncopate, and the movie flickers to life.
From New York Times ● Dec. 18, 2018
From 1935 the itch to complicate and syncopate gets to him.
From Slate ● Dec. 18, 2010
For there the need for quick action, which in life tends to syncopate emotion, does not exist.
From The Principles of Aesthetics by Dewitt H. Parker
“The way that he syncopates and phrases, if it’s not codified, then he escapes a dialogue about jazz piano history.”
From Washington Post ● Sep. 30, 2022
Langston syncopates his verbal abstractions in double time and then triple time, delivering conundrums like: “Creative manners to skip and erase from moment to moment/abstract, realist, most problematic version of futurism.”
From New York Times ● Jun. 17, 2022
A lovely painting that syncopates rectangles of black, red and teal hangs here next to a larger weaving with the same geometric arrangement.
From New York Times ● Nov. 26, 2021
He retains the MacNooder eloquence and syncopates it, polishing his quips for quotation, studying his audience.
From Time Magazine Archive
The theme again is "America" but it is mournful and bleeding now until the third movement, "1926," takes it up again and syncopates it.
From Time Magazine Archive
The opening ballad, “Risk It All,” is pretty but listless, with Mr. Mars singing over a gently plucked nylon-string guitar until a relaxed syncopated groove folds in.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 3, 2026
In court, Sheeran's team accepted that the two songs share a similar syncopated chord pattern.
From BBC ● Jun. 17, 2025
Eva Slater’s 1954 “Galaxy” insets a syncopated network of painted forms within a wooden panel, merging optical motion with material stasis.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 29, 2024
Each one’s momentary glow pulses alive and fades in syncopated rhythm with the drowsy croaks of bullfrogs.
From Salon ● May 10, 2024
The Dancing Fan was still dancing, its rubber feet beating out the same syncopated Persian rhythm I’d been listening to all night, but that wasn’t what woke me.
From "Darius the Great Is Not Okay" by Adib Khorram
The song is a masterclass in production, pulling and syncopating a sample from iconic dance hall tune “Coolie Dance Riddim,” released by Jamaican producer Cordel Skatta Burrell in 2003.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 21, 2026
A student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Eotvos composed “Angels” with speech morphing into song, syncopating percussion and electronic keyboards.
From Washington Times ● Jun. 9, 2017
Faced with Minnie Riperton’s kitschy, overblown “Give Me Time,” he comes up with a beautifully elliptical response, alternately swooning and syncopating, injecting a full minute of genuine pathos.
From Slate ● Dec. 22, 2016
Ragtime, the new music invented by black musicians, was shaking up the straightforward rhythms of the previous century and syncopating them irresistibly.
From The New Yorker ● Feb. 16, 2015
It presented itself to him as a picture—legs moving against the walls of buildings, diagonals of bodies, syncopating face lines.
From Erik Dorn by Ben Hecht
