Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use bystander in a sentence

22 example sentences · noun

Bystander means a person who, although present at some event, does not take part in it; an observer, witness, or spectator. Example: “The man walked down the street so sillily that many a bystander stopped and stared slack-jawed.”

Examples of bystander by meaning

nounA person who, although present at some event, does not take part in it; an observer, witness, or spectator.

  • Conservative influencer Nick Sortor is handcuffed Thursday night by a police officer outside an ICE facility in Portland, Oregon, a bystander video shows; the video does not show events leading up to the arrest.2025 October 3, Andy Rose, “Arrest of conservative influencer Nick Sortor outside Portland ICE building now under federal investigation”...

More sentences with bystander

  • The man walked down the street so sillily that many a bystander stopped and stared slack-jawed.From the entry sillily
  • The bystanders were indiscriminately gunned down by trigger-happy gang members.From the entry trigger-happy
  • Regular acts of courage—bystanders defusing fights, subordinates standing up to abusive power holders—inspired awe.2023 January 3, Dacher Keltner, “The Quiet Profundity of Everyday Awe”, in Jeffrey Goldberg, editor, The Atlantic, Washington, D.C.: The…. From the entry common
  • The Norman said nothing, but he did what the bystanders considered rather surprising in a knee-crooking Frenchman.2022, Ottilie A. Liljencrantz, The Thrall of Leif the Lucky: A Story of Viking Days. From the entry knee-crooking
  • No bystanders were killed or injured in the attacks, he told RFA’s Uyghur Service.2015 May 13, Roseanne Gerin, Shohret Hoshur, “Six Dead, Four Injured in Two Successive Suicide Attacks in China’s Xinjiang”, in Shohret…. From the entry lop
  • Adults love to talk about the importance of bystanders in stopping social cruelty.2013, Rosalind Wiseman, Masterminds & Wingmen: Helping Our Boys Cope with Schoolyard Power, Locker-Room Tests, Girlfriends, and the New…. From the entry bystanding
  • A few of the game cabinets are connected to flat-screen TVs so bystanders can stop and ogle.2008, Brian Ashcraft, Jean Snow, Arcade Mania: The Turbo-charged World of Japan's Game Centers. From the entry bullet hell
  • Just going out of their way to mislead the innocent bystander.1960, P[elham] G[renville] Wodehouse, “XVIII AND XX”, in Jeeves in the Offing, London: Herbert Jenkins, →OCLC. From the entry ruddy
  • The woes of the world call forth the loudest outcries from the bystanders.1932, Francis John McConnell, Aids to Christian Belief, New York, N.Y.; Cincinnati, Oh.; Chicago, Ill.: The Abingdon Press, page 108. From the entry bystanding
  • Now was that a blip or an indicator of the rotation reviving and the complementary players being more than non-useful bystanders?2024 July 23, Joel Sherman, “The trade deadline can’t be Yankees’ cure-all”, in New York Post, New York, N.Y.: News Corp, →ISSN, →OCLC…. From the entry non-useful
  • As in New York City’s Times Square seven months ago, hundreds of innocent bystanders might have been killed.2010 December 14, “Sweden's Near Miss”, in New York Times, A, page 34. From the entry near miss
  • Clearly, it cannot be consistently maintained that social workers are in all cases both insensitive breakers-up of families and ineffectual bystanders.1991, Bob Franklin, Nigel Parton, editors, Social Work, the Media, and Public Relations, London; New York, N.Y.: Routledge, →ISBN, page 77. From the entry breaker-up
  • In one case, they were almost too late - one of the bystanders who had helped with the initial rescue attempts had been reported missing.2026 March 18, Greg Morse, “1996 crash driving freight reforms”, in RAIL, number 1057, page 51. From the entry overcome
  • Sei thought she was summoned to another world completely by accident—a bystander, a leftover, and most certainly not the Holy Saint of legends.2021, Yuka Tachibana, translated by Kumar Sivasubramanian, The Saint’s Magic Power Is Omnipotent, volume 4, [Los Angeles, Calif.]: Seven…. From the entry potionmaker
  • An amateur actor thinks an innocent bystander is another member of the cast and shoots him with what he thinks is a prop gun.2014, Riding Gain, page 296. From the entry prop gun
  • Then back to a period of villain of the week, interrupting that with a superfight that created a new superheroine from an innocent bystander.1998 August 2, Stephen B. Mann, “A long running superhero game”, in rec.games.frp.super-heroes (Usenet). From the entry superfight
  • At other times the crowd below behaves more outrageously: The bystanders engage in "suicide baiting." They jeer and dare away at the wretch.1994, Dean Keith Simonton, Greatness. From the entry suicide baiting
  • The crooks have wrung such abundant profits from the coupons that "no prison sentence could be long enough," as one courtroom bystander put it.1981, The Current Digest of the Soviet Press - Volume 33, page 18. From the entry fuelish
  • A man who blocked and shouted at a driverless Waymo car later brutally beat a bystander who told him to let it go, California police reported.2024 July 17, Don Sweeney, “Man brutally beats bystander after standoff with driverless car, California cops say”, in The Sacramento Bee…. From the entry driverless
  • Other bystanders had noticed him and like Rizby, had kept their distance, but now they began to creep forward to peer at the body. ‘Stay back!’ Rizby yelled. ‘Back!2017, Singapore Red. From the entry stay back
  • Seems to an innocent bystander that the local Salvation Army is overlooking some source of big income by not starting a regular army doughnuteria in Main street.1919 January 1, “Oatmeal and Mackerel”, in James W. Greene, editor, Buffalo Morning Express, volume LXXIII, number 302, Buffalo, N.Y.: J.…. From the entry doughnuteria

Meaning of bystander

  1. noun A person who, although present at some event, does not take part in it; an observer, witness, or spectator.

Full definition of bystander

Questions about bystander in a sentence

How do you use bystander in a sentence?
Bystander is used as a noun. For example: “The man walked down the street so sillily that many a bystander stopped and stared slack-jawed.”
What is a short sentence with bystander?
“The bystanders were indiscriminately gunned down by trigger-happy gang members.”
What does bystander mean?
Bystander means a person who, although present at some event, does not take part in it; an observer, witness, or spectator.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bystander (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use bystander in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/bystander. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.