Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use civility in a sentence

14 example sentences · noun

Civility means speech or behaviour that is fit for civil interactions; politeness, courtesy. Example: “Scanty and underproportioned returns of civility. — Collier.”

More sentences with civility

  • Scanty and underproportioned returns of civility. — Collier.From the entry underproportioned
  • Civility ended when you wrongfully and baselessly accused me of being a fascist.2022 May 18, “There's always been enough food...”, in r/collapse (Reddit post), archived from the original on 06 Jun 2026. From the entry fashjacket
  • He evidently gets a heap too loose tongue if you offer him just a little civility.2019, Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne, Kate Meredith, Financier. From the entry carry corn
  • James and I believe we can bring that civility and compassion back into the world.2016 November 21, Bill O’Reilly, “About This Book”, in Bill O’Reilly, James Patterson, Give Please a Chance, London: Young Arrow, →ISBN. From the entry magical word
  • It's your role as host to nudge the teetolers toward unsobriety and the drunks toward civility.2014, Dan Pashman, Eat More Better: How to Make Every Bite More Delicious, page 290. From the entry unsobriety
  • But the truth is that I came to cherish Japan’s civility and selflessness.2011 March 19, Nicholas Kristof, “The Japanese Could Teach Us a Thing or Two”, in The New York Times. From the entry selflessness
  • This is a culture that’s about civility.2020 October 2, Emily Zemler, quoting Darren Star, “‘What would Carrie [Bradshaw] do?’ How ‘Sex and the City’ lives on in Netflix’s new…. From the entry bull in a china shop
  • Civility – translated as savoir-vivre in the French version – is one of the five "pillars" of Wikipedia.2011 January 12, Timothy Garton Ash, “We've seen America's vitriol. Now let's salute Wikipedia, a US pioneer of global civility”, in The…. From the entry wikipedia
  • You're acting in the service of civility, not abstract justice.2006 December, Douglas K. van Duyne, James A. Landay, Jason I. Hong, “Community Conference”, in The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating…. From the entry disemvowel
  • Brixton aside, the rule of civility in England still holds.1981 August 3, Marie Brenner, “The Wedding of the Century”, in New York Magazine, page 30. From the entry beefeater
  • What an immense difference civility in an inn does make.1945, Nikolai Tolstoy, quoting Patrick O’Brian, “‘The smallest habitation I had ever seen’”, in Patrick O’Brian: The Making of the…. From the entry Miss Austenish
  • The natives joked about Minnesota Nice, and outsiders called it conformity, but civility was in fact the norm and any rip in its fabric a vice.1997, David Lebedoff, Cleaning Up: The Exxon Valdez Case, from 3 Drinks to 5 Billion Dollars, Free Press, →ISBN, page 28. From the entry Minnesota nice
  • I can be rather unladilike in some of my responses and there is a point at which I willingly give up the pretense of civility and simply attack.1995 June 2, Babs Woods, “cook upset”, in rec.food.cooking (Usenet), archived from the original on 02 Jun 2025. From the entry unladilike
  • More and more extravagant and obscene material was being accumulated as if to subvert aesthetic notions of civility and decorum with new ideals of inclusive grotesquery and excess.1992, Richard Brown, “Beginnings”, in James Joyce: A Post-Culturalist Perspective (Macmillan Modern Novelists), Basingstoke, Hampshire…. From the entry gargantuanly

Meaning of civility

  1. noun Speech or behaviour that is fit for civil interactions; politeness, courtesy.
  2. noun An individual act or expression of polite behaviour; a courtesy.
  3. noun The state or fact of being civilized; civilization.

Full definition of civility

Questions about civility in a sentence

How do you use civility in a sentence?
Civility is used as a noun. For example: “Scanty and underproportioned returns of civility. — Collier.”
What is a short sentence with civility?
“This is a culture that’s about civility.”
What does civility mean?
Civility means speech or behaviour that is fit for civil interactions; politeness, courtesy.

Source and license

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