Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use carnal in a sentence

14 example sentences · adjective

Carnal means relating to the physical and especially sexual appetites or activities. Example: “At the town of Mendes, in the principal temple, there was a living male goat, with which, if the statement of Herodotus is to be accepted, naked female worshippers actually had carnal intercourse.”

Examples of carnal by meaning

adjectiveRelating to the physical and especially sexual appetites or activities.

  • At the town of Mendes, in the principal temple, there was a living male goat, with which, if the statement of Herodotus is to be accepted, naked female worshippers actually had carnal intercourse.1941, George Ryley Scott, Phallic Worship: A History of Sex and Sex Rites in Relation to the Religions of All Races from Antiquity to the...

More sentences with carnal

  • The coarsest sensualists are in thrall more to their brainish fantasies than to their carnal appetites.2013, Michael Curran, Sentences. From the entry brainish
  • Therefore, what Proverbs is to Godlike wisdom, Ecclesiastes is to man's carnal tendencies and his self indulgences.2004, Ed Marr, Vol 1: Repentance: The Doctrine of God and the Knowledge of Salvation (in the Old Testament), page 268. From the entry self indulgence
  • Could the most exemplary character have triumphed over such unvegetarian, not to say carnal, lips?1929, Ellen Glasgow, They Stooped to Folly (The Old Dominion Edition of the Works of Ellen Glasgow), Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran &…. From the entry unvegetarian
  • He, too, had a touch of soul-ache; but luckily it did not interfere with his carnal appetite.1911, William John Locke, The Glory of Clementina Wing, John Lane, page 139. From the entry soulache
  • Peter Clifford needs to take down Mike Brunley and his carnival of carnal hijinxs to make Upton's exposure truly sensational.2001, Leo F. White, Dirty Pictures, BookBaby, →ISBN. From the entry hijinxs
  • We associate her with Virgin Mary, who conceived in an act of spiritual purity and not in carnal lust and desire.1995, Merete Leonhardt-Lupa, “A Mother's Sexuality”, in A Mother Is Born: Preparing for Motherhood During Pregnancy, Westport, Conn.…. From the entry madonna
  • "Sweating bodies entwined in carnal passion!2019, Shaun Barger, Mage Against the Machine, page 146. From the entry flower
  • We grow weary of our paltry carnal transports, our ebulliences of defiance, our abortive expeditions to the frontiers of the respectable world.2016, David Bentley Hart, “Charles Baudelaire: From within the Veil”, in Kenneth Oakes, editor, Christian Wisdom Meets Modernity…. From the entry ebullience
  • Hamann's view, 'co—exist' with multiplicity; there are indeed a variety of meanings for a text: 'literal or grammatical, carnal or dialectical, Capernaitic or historical'.2010, Gwen Griffith Dickson, Johann Georg Hamann's Relational Metacriticism, page 106. From the entry Capernaitic
  • It was during his professorship at Cornell that Vladimir Nabokov engendered the smart-mouthed, coolly carnal Lolita Haze, the namesake of his most famous novel.1997, Mallay Charters, “PW interview: Brian Hall: Travels of a Teenage Ulysses”, in Publishers Weekly, volume 244, New York, N.Y., →ISSN…. From the entry Ithacan
  • Ironically, too, the wine was a yeared Bollinger of almost carnal subtlety and while Sutcliffe's stomach quailed his palate hungered for the treat.1982, Lawrence Durrell, Constance (Avignon Quintet), Faber & Faber, published 2004, page 701. From the entry yeared
  • There is no crudity here, no carnal implication, no vulgar song to Eros, rather a simple, and in a sense pure peanism to Love itself.1932, Harold Vinal, editor, Voices, numbers 67-78 [exact issue unclear], page 37. From the entry peanism
  • At last they hit on a bright idea; they put John’s arms around a lamp post, handcuffed him, and sauntered off to collect the sack of carnal evidence.1936 November, Julian Dana, “‘God—Grant—Victory’”, in The Man Who Built San Francisco: A Study of Ralston’s Journey with Banners, New…. From the entry johnless

Meaning of carnal

  1. adjective Relating to the physical and especially sexual appetites or activities.
  2. adjective Worldly or earthly; temporal.
  3. adjective Of or relating to the body or flesh.

Full definition of carnal

Questions about carnal in a sentence

How do you use carnal in a sentence?
Carnal is used as an adjective. For example: “At the town of Mendes, in the principal temple, there was a living male goat, with which, if the statement of Herodotus is to be accepted, naked female worshippers actually had carnal intercourse.”
What is a short sentence with carnal?
“"Sweating bodies entwined in carnal passion!”
What does carnal mean?
Carnal means relating to the physical and especially sexual appetites or activities.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: carnal (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 carnal in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/carnal. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.