How to use careen in a sentence

11 example sentences · verb, noun

Careen means to heave a ship down on one side so as to expose the other, in order to clean it of barnacles and weed, or to repair it below the water line. Example: “The axle broke and the wheel windmilled in place briefly before careening through the wall.”

Examples of careen by meaning

verbTo lurch or sway violently from side to side.

They were not motionless, but swayed to and fro above her head, thronging out of one sky-light into another, as if the universe and not the air-ship was careening.1909, E. M. Forster, “Chapter I”, in The Machine Stops

verbTo move swiftly and in an uncontrolled way.

He tries for a lot of things, careening wildly from earnest romance to feel-good comedy to hackneyed suspense, all the while leaving it up to the audience to suss out the moral complexity and existential terror underneath the glossy surface.2016 December 20, Katie Rife, “Passengers strains the considerable charms of Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence”, in The Onion AV Club...
It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years.2020 April 3, Arundhati Roy, “The pandemic is a portal”, in Financial Times, London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC
The country has careened through nearly a century of instability, marred by military coups and spectacular financial collapses epitomized by triple-digit inflation.2026 May 28, Emma Bubola, Ryan Mac, “Why Peter Thiel Is Decamping to the End of the World”, in The New York Times

More sentences with careen

The axle broke and the wheel windmilled in place briefly before careening through the wall.From the entry windmill
The truck raced southbound, then careened into the ditch.From the entry southbound
A ginger-hackled footman careened to a stop by the open door.2014, Jo Ann Brown, A Bride for the Baron, page 39. From the entry ginger-hackled
The sedan careened, flopped over to the right.2012, L. Ron Hubbard, Mouthpiece. From the entry whack up
He brought the dinghy up to the careening hard.1967, John Christopher, The White Mountains. From the entry hard
In fact, so inebriated were they that they could barely move, and, neither nest nor wheel being personned, the ship was as usual careening wildly across the main.2018 September, Paul Bowers, “The Wrasse and the Flatfish”, in The Panda Chronicles: A Mythology, 2nd edition, [Morrisiville, N.C.]…. From the entry person
At an ice-walled slide that shoots down the steep bank, revelers sit on woven mats or stand in street shoes for careening descents to the frozen water.1989 December 24, Moana Tregaskis, “Crystalline Ice Fantasies In Frozen Manchuria”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the…. From the entry Sungari

Meaning of careen

verb To heave a ship down on one side so as to expose the other, in order to clean it of barnacles and weed, or to repair it below the water line.
verb To tilt on one side.
verb To lurch or sway violently from side to side.

Full definition of careen

Questions about careen in a sentence

How do you use careen in a sentence?: Careen is used as a verb and noun. For example: “The axle broke and the wheel windmilled in place briefly before careening through the wall.”
What is a short sentence with careen?: “The sedan careened, flopped over to the right.”
What does careen mean?: Careen means to heave a ship down on one side so as to expose the other, in order to clean it of barnacles and weed, or to repair it below the water line.

Adapted from Wiktionary: careen (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.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

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