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.

But as always in Matisse, you can feel something brewing — a tension, a sense of feeling so heightened that you intuit it will take all of Matisse’s disinterested and self-abnegating intelligence to master.

From Washington Post • Nov. 21, 2021

As deeply unwoke as it is, no one was more self-abnegating than the actual Gwen Verdon, who became the keeper of Fosse’s reputation and who willingly told people he “created” her.

From Slate • Dec. 13, 2019

In this case, the drifter is Josh, a persnickety, self-abnegating student living in Melbourne.

From The New Yorker • Nov. 19, 2018

Most students reacted differently through self-humiliation and self-abnegating subjugation.

From Salon • Sep. 8, 2018

She felt that the country needed a great central figure capable of inspiring confidence and banishing uncertainty, a strong, well-balanced, broad-minded, self-abnegating chief executive, and she proposed to furnish one.

From Court Life in China by Headland, Isaac Taylor