How to use competence in a sentence
32 example sentences · noun
Competence means the quality or state of being competent, i.e. able or suitable for a general role. Example: “The bill was denied royal assent because the Scottish Parliament does not have legislative competence on the bill's matter.”
Examples of competence by meaning
nounThe quality or state of being competent, i.e. able or suitable for a general role.
- Teachers are now required to teach intercultural communicative competence.2005, Lies Sercu, Ewa Bandura, Foreign Language Teachers and Intercultural Competence: An International Investigation
nounThe legal authority to deal with a matter.
- The bill was denied royal assent because the Scottish Parliament does not have legislative competence on the bill's matter.
- K C Wheare's definition of federalism requires that two governments be independent and co-ordinate within their own spheres, generally set out by the division of competences codified in a constitution, which is supreme.2016, German Institute for International and Security Affairs, “Division of competences in the European Union”, in (Please provide the book...
- Also, the Constitutional Court has tried to reduce impunity in cases of human rights abuses by narrowly interpreting the legal competence of military justice to investigate military and police officers.2003, Rodrigo Uprimny, “The constitutional court and control of presidential extraordinary powers in Colombia”, in Democratization...
More sentences with competence
- Costs for GCS can vary depending on regional factors, surgeon competence, and competition.2017, Kevin L. Nadal, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Psychology and Gender, SAGE Publications, →ISBN, page 704. From the entry gcs
- Programs of work should provide students the opportunities to demonstrate both academic and vocational competence attainment.1991, Wisconsin State Board of Vocational, Technical and Adult Education, Accountability Report, and ... State Plan for Vocational…. From the entry academic
- According to Noam Chomsky, linguistic theory should concern itself primarily with the investigation of a speaker's competence.1981, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Bilingualism Or Not: The Education of Minorities, page 86. From the entry Noam
- Warren, and having made a competence she now lived the quiet life of the bourgeoise.1915, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter XLVII, in Of Human Bondage, New York, N.Y.: George H[enry] Doran Company, →OCLC, page 235. From the entry notorious
- The findings of this study reveal that the themes of self-depreciation discourse prominently focus on competence and achievement.2023, Li, H.X., Liu, J.Y. and Zhang, X.Y., “A Pragmatic Study of Self-Depreciation in Social Media Context”, in Open Access Library Journal. From the entry self-depreciation
- Your culture used to know its job; now you're changing that job, and it has to relearn then re-earn its competence.2015, Stan Slap, Under the Hood: Fire Up and Fine-Tune Your Employee Culture, →ISBN. From the entry re-earn
- Cultural competence requires an attitude of respect for the evaluand and its diverse consumers, providers, and other stakeholders.2008, Michael Morris, Evaluation Ethics for Best Practice, →ISBN, page 47. From the entry evaluand
- The more 'real' communalization is realized, the more decision-making competence the communes have on how to fulfil the tasks.2008, Brian Dollery, Lorenzo Robotti, The Theory and Practice of Local Government Reform, page 168. From the entry communalization
- The significance of breaktimes as a mechanism for children to develop social competence is highlighted in much of Peter Blatchford's work.2006, Brigette Bishop, Promoting Friendships in the Playground: A Peer Befriending Programme for Primary Schools, page 4. From the entry breaktime
- It cannot be concluded that all adults have acquired the degree of grammatical competence assumed by many linguists.2004, David Michael Singleton, Lisa Ryan, Language acquisition: the age factor, page 59. From the entry malformedness
- Neither of us vaunts much competence in the egg world, but it must have been rotten, the curate's egg.1992, G[ordon] Pask, G[erard] de Zeeuw, “A Succinct Summary of Novel Theories”, in Robert Trappl, editor, Cybernetics and Systems Research…. From the entry curate's egg
- Party functionaries at all levels are essentially dilettantes who may have diplomas or study certificates but not real competence.1991, Ilya Zemtsov, Encyclopedia of Soviet Life, page 221. From the entry manqués
- In much the same way, morphological competence is reflected in the native speaker's intuitions about morphological well-formedness and structure.1988, Andrew Radford, Transformational Grammar, Cambridge: University Press, →ISBN, page 5. From the entry morphological
- A relatively small number have been given some competence in coaching the intellectual skills—largely in the language arts.1983, Mortimer J. Adler, Paideia Problems and Possibilities, New York; London: Macmillan Publishing Company; Collier Macmillan Publishers…. From the entry Socratically
- The Spanish secret police had some of the spirit of the Gestapo, but not much of its competence.1938 April, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter XIII, in Homage to Catalonia, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC, page 227. From the entry Gestapo
- It has been a remarkably swift and comprehensive process of localization, and the competence of government in Hong Kong has not suffered an iota.2022, Chris Patten, The Hong Kong Diaries, Penguin UK, →ISBN. From the entry localization
- A performance is apt if, and only if, it is correct attributably to a competence exercised by the performer, in conditions appropriate for its exercise.2022, Yong Huang, Ernest Sosa Encountering Chinese Philosophy, page 122. From the entry attributably
- If you want to grow in your competence of reading Scripture and have a crackalackin good time doing it, read this book!2021, Michael F. Bird, Seven Things I Wish Christians Knew about the Bible, Zondervan Reflective, →ISBN. From the entry crackalackin'
- The environmental comfort category is illustrative of cases in which there are low environmental presses matched against a number of personal competences.2009, Allison E. Smith, Ageing in Urban Neighbourhoods, page 88. From the entry press
- You want to cross-examine an officer about his competence with regards to radar and the radar he used to ticket you with.2002, Brian Jonathan Wolk, “Producing Inconsistencies in Various Cases”, in Ohio Traffic Tickets are for the Birds: A Practical Defense…. From the entry radar
- Greatorex, just arrived for the day, and diffusing an atmosphere of easy competence and inoffensively general familiarity, put his head in at the door.1923, Ernest Bramah [pseudonym; Ernest Brammah Smith], “(please specify the page)”, in The Eyes of Max Carrados, London: Grant Richards…. From the entry inoffensively
- The conventional wisdom is that the American public has lost faith in the humanities—and lost both competence and interest in reading and writing, possibly heralding a post-literacy age.2024 October 23, Tyler Austin Harper, “ChatGPT Doesn’t Have to Ruin College”, in The Atlantic. From the entry postliteracy
- The principle of conferral binds the EU with respect to any unional action and can be understood as a presumption in favour of the competences of the Member States.2011 October 12, Albrecht Weber, “The Distribution of Competences between the Union and the Member States”, in Hermann-Josef Blanke…. From the entry unional
- Strong on administrative competence, the ministers as a group were united in their indebtedness to Fleury and in a collective mistrust of any putative successor from the court.2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin, published 2003, pages 120–1. From the entry indebtedness
- However, because the winch drivers' competence is more visible than the holdmen's, winch drivers are more vulnerable to supervision even though options for handling incompetence are limited contractually.1997, David Wellman, The Union Makes Us Strong, page 154. From the entry holdman
- It is shown that equilingualisms, native competence in each of a bilingual's languages, is common when the languages are acquired in childhood but cannot generally be obtained after puberty.1979, Jacob Ornstein-Galicia, Robert N. St. Clair (editors), Bilingualism and Bilingual Education, New Readings and Insights, page 282. From the entry equilingualism
- Her story indicates distress on her part that she will be unable to support and supervize nurses on the other ward as she does not know their levels of competence.2010, Nursing Research Methods, Volume 2, Sage, page 239. From the entry supervize
- A government with even a nodding acquaintance with competence and good sense would have launched an all-out war against Al Qaeda, not Iraq, in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11.2004 July 12, Bob Herbert, “Opinion: The Real Enemy Staring Us in the Face”, in New York Times, retrieved 08 May 2013. From the entry nodding acquaintance
Meaning of competence
- noun The quality or state of being competent, i.e. able or suitable for a general role.
- noun The quality or state of being able or suitable for a particular task; the quality or state of being competent for a particular task or skill.
- noun The system of linguistic knowledge possessed by native speakers of a language, as opposed to its actual use in concrete situations (performance), cf. linguistic competence.
Questions about competence in a sentence
- How do you use competence in a sentence?
- Competence is used as a noun. For example: “The bill was denied royal assent because the Scottish Parliament does not have legislative competence on the bill's matter.”
- What is a short sentence with competence?
- “Teachers are now required to teach intercultural communicative competence.”
- What does competence mean?
- Competence means the quality or state of being competent, i.e. able or suitable for a general role.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: competence (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 competence in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/competence. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
