Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use debilitating in a sentence

15 example sentences · adjective

Debilitating means causing a loss of energy or strength. Example: “The American Dream suffered a debilitating effect after the subprime crisis.”

Examples of debilitating by meaning

adjectiveCausing a loss of energy or strength.

  • These spells hit him hard when they came, and were always accompanied by a debilitating fever and general weakness.1931, H.P. Lovecraft, The Whisperer in Darkness
  • Utterly debilitating and life-ruining at worst.2025 October 20, Lucy Mangan, “My OCD is back. It's exhausting and awful, but this time I'm ready”, in The i Paper, archived from the...

More sentences with debilitating

  • The American Dream suffered a debilitating effect after the subprime crisis.From the entry debilitate
  • Hypoadrenalism is a most debilitating disorder affecting the adrenal glands that leaves one with very little energy no matter how or what one tries to increase one’s energy.From the entry hypoadrenalism
  • They can carry debilitating diseases like dengue, chikungunya or zika, which can lead to birth defects.2024 October 7, Rachel Wulff, “Invasive yellow fever mosquitoes detected across Sacramento area”, in CBS Sacramento, Sacramento, archived…. From the entry yellow-fever mosquito
  • The effect on the Parthian Empire is unrecorded but presumably was equally debilitating.2014, Philip Matyszak, The Roman Empire, Oneworld Publications, page 143. From the entry Parthian Empire
  • Still, I see you mean well enough, and are merely suffering from the debilitating cheerfulness of youth.2002, House of the Seven Gables - Page 37. From the entry grow out of
  • The young man comes to the foreground, deranking the debilitating illness to the background.1996, Lorraine M. Wright, Beliefs: The Heart of Healing in Families and Illness, page 236. From the entry derank
  • Bernardo's physicians treated their lawyer-patient in the ordinary ignorant ways, with debilitating bleedings, plus helpful lancings of the abscessed boils.2011, Paul Oppenheimer, Machiavelli: A Life Beyond Ideology, page 46. From the entry lancing
  • It wasn't any kind of physical illness, not measles or chicken pox or even the Hershey Squirts, the most humiliating and debilitating of them all.1991, Stephen King, Needful Things. From the entry Hershey squirts
  • The Penguin can also fairly be described as an HBO gangster drama whose antihero is a brutal but troubled mid-level Mafioso with limitless ambition and debilitating maternal issues.2024 September 19, Judy Berman, “HBO’s The Penguin Is a Stylish, Dumbed-Down Trump Allegory That Speaks to TV’s Decline”, in TIME…. From the entry limitless
  • Experience in Australia indicates that after a devastating weather event, up to one-fifth of people suffer the debilitating effects of extreme stress, emotional injury, and despair.2017, Anthony J. McMichael, Alistair Woodward, Cameron Muir, Climate Change and the Health of Nations, →ISBN, page 67. From the entry event
  • A better understanding of the pathogenic events leading to dementia in variant TTR meningovascular amyloidosis may lead to novel treatment strategies for this debilitating and fatal disease.2015 July 10, Jennifer L. Ziskin et al., “Neuropathologic analysis of Tyr69His TTR variant meningovascular amyloidosis with dementia”, in…. From the entry meningovascular
  • Touring with Ninja was nothing like legendarily scabrous Led Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods: forget coke and groupies, Ninja artists struggled instead with their debilitating addictions to vinyl.2010 September 21, Stevie Chick, “Ninja Tune Week: An Extract from Stevie Chick’s 20 Years of Beats and Pieces”, in The Quietus. From the entry legendarily
  • The buzzies, in fact, produced so much fine dust that they led to a higher rate of silicosis, a debilitating respiratory disease, and were soon dubbed "widowmakers."2006, Clemens P. Work, Darkest Before Dawn: Sedition and Free Speech in the American West, →ISBN. From the entry buzzie

Meaning of debilitating

  1. adjective Causing a loss of energy or strength.

Full definition of debilitating

Questions about debilitating in a sentence

How do you use debilitating in a sentence?
Debilitating is used as an adjective. For example: “The American Dream suffered a debilitating effect after the subprime crisis.”
What is a short sentence with debilitating?
“Utterly debilitating and life-ruining at worst.”
What does debilitating mean?
Debilitating means causing a loss of energy or strength.

Source and license

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