Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use colonial in a sentence

40 example sentences · adjective, noun

Colonial means of or pertaining to a colony. Example: “Before colonial times cowry shells imported from Mauritius were used as money in Western Africa.”

Examples of colonial by meaning

adjectiveOf or pertaining to a period when a country or territory was a colony.

  • Those entering it are greeted by wire fences, walls dating back to colonial times and security posts.2013 June 8, “The new masters and commanders”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8839, archived from the original on 25 Nov 2020, page 52
  • India’s half-hour zone dates back to colonial rule of India and the era when ever-faster steamships and trains were shrinking the world.2024 May 8, Dhruv Tikekar, “How India got stuck in its own unusual time zone”, in CNN

nounA person from a country that is or was controlled by another.

  • The rest of us had tea and finger sandwiches with members of the royal household, which was very elegant but hard on some of us ill-schooled colonials.2020 June 23, John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, New York, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, →ISBN, page 150

nounA coin or postage stamp issued by a colony.

  • As a collector and student of certain Greek colonials and a specialist in forgeries I have been familiar with Stelli's workmanship for years.1914, Ernest Bramah, Max Carrados

More sentences with colonial

  • Before colonial times cowry shells imported from Mauritius were used as money in Western Africa.From the entry money
  • In the 19th century, Britain and France were major colonial powers.From the entry power
  • During the colonial period, Britain used Canada as a major source of furs.From the entry fur
  • The imperialist power practiced primitivization on its colonial possessions.From the entry primitivization
  • The Spanish colonial government in the Philippines implemented desinicization policies on the Chinese immigrants in order to be assimilated into the mainstream Filipino society.From the entry desinicization
  • The topas represented the earlier colonial presence of Portugal in the subcontinent.2020, Sujit Sivasundaram, Waves Across the South, William Collins, published 2021, page 110. From the entry topas
  • They also learned about the long-term impacts of colonial practices such as overfishing.2019 October 1, Diane Lucow, “MEd grad ready to reinvent her approach to teaching”, in Faculty of Education - Simon Fraser University. From the entry Kwantlen
  • Bartolomé de las Casas is a seminal figure of early Latin American colonial history and literature.2019, David Thomas Orique and Rady Roldán-Figueroa, “Introduction: Three Waves of Lascasian Scholarship”, in Bartolomé de las Casas, O.P.…. From the entry Lascasian
  • The term “Guangzhou film” cannot operate independently outside Hong Kong and its colonial dimension.2018 February 14, Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Early Film Culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Republican China: Kaleidoscopic Histories, University…. From the entry Cantophone
  • Why may this hyperracialized identity have congealed in the late colonial period?2014, Mitra Sharafi, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772–1947, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 311. From the entry hyperracialized
  • In Indochina, this practice was rooted in various European and colonial (British India) practices.2014, Aline Demay, “The Origin of Tourist Practices in Indochina (1856–1910)”, in Tourism and Colonization in Indochina (1898–1939)…. From the entry climatism
  • Settlerist principles meant the Australian colonies believed Britain had an obligation to buy colonial wine.2012, Julie McIntyre, First Vintage: Wine in colonial New South Wales, →ISBN. From the entry settlerist
  • And I suppose to some extent my colonial interest swayed the decision a bit.2011, Tim Bowden, No Tern Unstoned: Musings at Breakfast. From the entry reissuing
  • A pagri was a form of "illegal payment" that had developed to circumvent colonial rent restrictions.2010, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, chapter 2, in The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries…. From the entry pagri
  • Already we've seen early hallmarks of the twentieth century: colonial decay, cultural appropriation, and competing trademarks.2010, Roger Bennett, Eli Horowitz, Everything You Know Is Pong, Harper Collins, →ISBN, page 4. From the entry gossima
  • Our presence was grounded in a crime, namely colonial conquest, perpetuated by apartheid.2009, J. M. Coetzee, “Martin”, in Summertime, New York: Viking, page 209. From the entry illegitimate
  • For most colonial wives, the houseboi, the domestic servant, was the first real contact with a native.2007, Anne Dickson-Waiko, “Colonial Enclaves and Domestic Spaces in British New Guinea”, in Kate Darian-Smith et al., editors, Britishness…. From the entry houseboi
  • They sometimes transgressed colonial boundaries, forming border communities with Native Americans and escaped black slaves.2006, Matt Wray, Not Quite White, page 17. From the entry transgress
  • Donatary captaincies were the political, territorial, and administrative units of colonial Brazil.2006, John Michael Francis, Iberia and the Americas, page 412. From the entry donatary captaincy
  • The qero cups included in the project date from the Inka period through the colonial period.2002, Pamela B. Vandiver, Martha Goodway, Jennifer L. Mass, Materials issues in art and archaeology VI. From the entry qero
  • Important matters have to absorbed by osmosis: these things are not spoken of, except by colonials.2002 February 5, anton, “Re: Teachers told to instil pupils with ‘white pride’”, in alt.politics.british (Usenet), message-ID…. From the entry unEnglish
  • The mutiny marked a crucial shift in the colonial imagining of India as unantagonistically feminine.2000, Sangeta Ray, En-Gendering India. From the entry unantagonistically
  • Under Japanese colonial rule, Pingtung city and its environs had been famous for anti-Japanese activities.1998, Linda Chao, Ramon H. Myers, The First Chinese Democracy, Johns Hopkins University Press, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 85. From the entry Pingtung
  • Far from being a homogeneous monolith, colonial society comprised many divergent races and ethnic groups.1996, Charles Patrick Neimeyer, “A True Pell-mell of Human Souls: The Germans in the Continental Army”, in America at War: A Social…. From the entry monolith
  • Dissatisfaction with colonial education gave revivalism one of its raison d'êtres.1990, Krishna Kumar, "Hindu Revivalism and Education in North-Central India," Social Scientist, Vol. 18, No. 10, Oct. 1990, JSTOR, pg. 4. From the entry raison d'êtres
  • English was the official vehicle and the magic formula to colonial elitedom.1986, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind, Heinemann, published 2005, page 12. From the entry elitedom
  • Calypso began with the "chantwells." These were slaves who entertained plantation owners in colonial times.1976, Robert J. Alexander et al., edited by John P. Augelli, Caribbean Lands, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Fideler Co., →ISBN, page 89, column 1. From the entry chantwell
  • It was an unlovely colonial farmhouse, box-shaped and gambrel-roofed, fast falling into the ground.1974, Karl Edward Wagner, Sticks. From the entry gambrel-roofed
  • In essence, that was the inspiring motive behind their colonial satellitization.1972, Akademika. From the entry satellitization
  • The United States Supreme Court, however, was not the colonial judiciary.1960, Louis W. Koenig, The Invisible Presidency, Rinehart, page 15. From the entry gelidly
  • Still in the colonial period, it began to be charged when it focused on the ownership of edified buildings.2024, Ana Arromba Dinis, Fátima David, Liliana Pereira, Assessing Policy Landscapes in Taxation Dynamics, page 331. From the entry edified
  • During most of the Manchu colonial period — the Qing Dynasty — Taiwan was ruled as a prefecture of Fujian.2023 September 25, Michael Turton, “Notes from Central Taiwan: What is China preparing for?”, in Taipei Times, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from…. From the entry Fujian
  • Under colonial rule, learning or speaking my grandma’s native Hokkien, along with dozens of indigenous languages, was illegal by law.2022 June 22, Zoe Yu, “Endangered Languages Are Worth Saving”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 22 Jun…. From the entry Hokkien
  • Insofar as anti-Gallicanism became a feature of colonial life, it was part of a much more complex cultural politics.2020, D. H. Robinson, The Idea of Europe and the Origins of the American Revolution, →ISBN, page 9. From the entry anti-Gallicanism
  • In colonial times, when land was not worth much and banks didn’t exist, most lending was based on human property.2019 August 14, Matthew Desmond, “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation”, in…. From the entry collateral
  • My paternal grandfather U May Oung, a Rakhaing, feared the erosion of the Buddhist way of life under colonial rule.2019, Kin Thida Oung, The Road from Mandalay. From the entry Rakhaing

Meaning of colonial

  1. adjective Of or pertaining to a colony.
  2. adjective Of or pertaining to a period when a country or territory was a colony.
  3. adjective Of or pertaining to the ideals of colonialism.

Full definition of colonial

Questions about colonial in a sentence

How do you use colonial in a sentence?
Colonial is used as an adjective and noun. For example: “Before colonial times cowry shells imported from Mauritius were used as money in Western Africa.”
What is a short sentence with colonial?
“The imperialist power practiced primitivization on its colonial possessions.”
What does colonial mean?
Colonial means of or pertaining to a colony.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: colonial (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:

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