Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use elusive in a sentence

40 example sentences · adjective

Elusive means evading capture, comprehension or remembrance. Example: “It's the very first time such an elusive bird has been caught on film.”

Examples of elusive by meaning

adjectiveEvading capture, comprehension or remembrance.

  • The elusive criminal was arrested

adjectiveDifficult to make precise.

  • A precise definition of diarrhea is elusive2010, Robbins & Cotran Pathologic Basis of Disease
  • Charley chased the elusive idea through all the nooks and crannies of his drowning consciousness.1910, Jack London, chapter 6, in Lost Face, archived from the original on 14 Apr 2011

adjectiveRarely seen.

  • While you're sniffing the trunks of the ponderosas to see if they're butterscotch, vanilla, strawberry, or the elusive chocolate variety, watch for Brown Creepers, an elusive variety of bird.2002, Scott Roederer, Birding: Rocky Mountain National Park, page 93

More sentences with elusive

  • It's the very first time such an elusive bird has been caught on film.From the entry catch
  • The prosecutor offered the lieutenant immunity for all the crimes he would testify having known to be planned by the elusive drug baron.From the entry immunity
  • This being the case, proof of cognation remains elusive even in the case of conspicuous lexical lookalikes.2014 October 18, Ante Aikio, “The Uralic-Yukaghir lexical correspondences: genetic inheritance, language contact or chance resemblance?”…. From the entry cognation
  • With experience, a trendwatcher becomes skilled at spotting the elusive and subtle shifts that signal fashion change.2005, Evelyn L. Brannon, Fashion forecasting. From the entry trendwatcher
  • It was a very elusive thing, because you couldn't underpack it or overpack it.2000 October 6, Dave Kehr, “AT THE MOVIES; Burstyn Past And Present”, in The New York Times. From the entry underpack
  • Built-in ringlight flash provides virtually shadowless, wraparound illumination for inaccessible or elusive subjects.1985, Eyes of Nikon: a comprehensive guide to Nikkor and Nikon series E lenses. From the entry ringlight
  • I discovered that, although elusive and fleeting, gender euphoria did exist, and it was bursting out everywhere from inside me.2024, Alana S. Portero, translated by Mara Faye Lethem, Bad Habit, 4th Estate, page 106. From the entry gender euphoria
  • As the Biden administration and its allies try to secure an elusive cease-fire in Gaza, Israel appears to have gone rogue.2024 August 2, Steven Erlanger, “Netanyahu, Defiant, Appears to Have Gone Rogue, Risking a Regional War”, in The New York Times, →ISSN. From the entry go rogue
  • You know, to find that healthy, elusive balance between “responsibly engaged” and “on the verge of a primal scream.”2022 February 14, Starshine Roshell, “Santa Barbara School Teacher’s Rant Is All Wrong”, in Santa Barbara Independent. From the entry covidy
  • Where is this elusive, magical fear trash can?2021 June 1, Erin King, You’re Kind of a Big Deal: Level Up by Unlocking Your Audacity, McGraw-Hill Education, →ISBN, page 45. From the entry Marie-Kondo
  • In Rust, the compiler plays a gatekeeper role by refusing to compile code with these elusive bugs, including concurrency bugs.2019, Steve Klabnik, Carol Nichols, The Rust Programming Language, No Starch Press, →ISBN, page xxvi. From the entry rust
  • It's a particle so elusive that even the world's largest physics experiment could only discover it by accident.2015 July 15, “Pentaquark discovery at LHC shows long-sought new form of matter [print version: LHC bags another new particle, 18 July…. From the entry pentaquark
  • The exact physiological function of BChE remains elusive, although it acts as an endogenous bioscavenger for anticholinesterase agents.2015 October 8, “New Insights into Butyrylcholinesterase Activity Assay: Serum Dilution Factor as a Crucial Parameter”, in PLOS ONE, →DOI. From the entry bioscavenger
  • Finally, at a likely looking north-south crossroad, we turned left and found elusive US 14 two miles north.2012, Richard G. Chapman, Work Break, page 114. From the entry crossroad
  • So if the bad boy’s proving elusive, why not try some novel, rewarding activities with a virtuous one?2012 May 14, Susan Carnell, “Bad Boys, Bad Brains”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name). From the entry stick around
  • At midnight, Elizabeth and her friends apple-pied the beds of her brother David and James, who was still being frustratingly elusive.2012, Lady Colin Campbell, The Queen Mother: The Untold Story of Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, Who Became Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, New…. From the entry apple-pie
  • Is there an ignorant ‘I’ and an elusive ‘I’?2011, Michael Gluckman, Making Your Wisdom Come Alive: A Guide to the Source of Your Wisdom and Joy, Light Up Your Life, →ISBN. From the entry i
  • His fiction, which has only recently been appearing here, can be stylistically elusive, but in essence it is chokingly direct.2007 April 12, Richard Eder, “A Line Divides Art and Life. Erase It at Your Own Risk.”, in New York Times. From the entry chokingly
  • However, while both designer and creature seem intent on zeroing in on real and pure duckness, this state remains elusive.2003, European Association for American Studies. Conference, Hans Bak, Walter Hölbling, "Natures nation" revisited (page 434). From the entry duckness
  • A new agreement with the IMF has proved elusive.2002 October 26, “New faces of Andean politics”, in The Economist, U.S. edition. From the entry dollarization
  • Any attempt to answer that question would carry us into the labyrinthine corridors of Jefferson's famously elusive mind.2000, Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, page 51. From the entry labyrinthine
  • CFIDS, even bigger than a medical giraffe, is almost like Sesame Street’s elusive giant puppet Snuffleupagus—witnessed only by believers.2000, Peggy Munson, Stricken: Voices from the Hidden Epidemic of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. From the entry Snuffleupagus
  • The business model for online entertainment remained elusive.1999, John Geirland, Eva Sonesh Kedar, Digital Babylon, page 91. From the entry webisodic
  • Readership figures are elusive, but fanfic's America Online index page has collected a half million hits in the past year.1997 September 26, Entertainment Weekly, page 84. From the entry fan fiction
  • Over the last few days her mind had time and again recurred to these elusive beings and those few elusive comments.1993 May, Vikram Seth, chapter 3, in A Suitable Boy, London: Phoenix, Orion Books, published 1996, →ISBN, page 171. From the entry recur
  • For some strange and elusive reason, the staid, prosaic herringbones have angled themselves into a position of fashion prominence.1963, Men's Wear, volume 147, page 39. From the entry herringbone
  • That exemption was not intended to be a hair splitting elusive hope to be tweedled away by administrative interpretation.1941, United States. Congress. House. Committee on the Judiciary, Hearings, page 248. From the entry tweedle
  • Its gay gambooge-coloured flowers, enveloped in an elusive fragrance, are as charming as anything in the Suffructicosa section.1922 December 2, [Francis] Kingdon Ward, “Mr. Kingdon Ward’s Seventh Expedition in Asia. No. III. To Lichiang.”, in The Gardeners’…. From the entry gamboge
  • Electrons are quite as elusive as ghosts; we are only aware of them as the conclusion to a colossal sorites.1917, Aleister Crowley, Moonchild, Weiser, published 2010, page 217. From the entry sorites
  • Examining it with binoculars, before entering, as it was quite open, I espied another of these elusive water-witches upon its nest.1914, Arthur A Allen, "At home with a Hell-Diver". in Bird-Lore, volume XVI, number 4. From the entry water-witch
  • Anonymity lies at the center of the mythology surrounding the elusive street artist Banksy, but he may have revealed his name in a resurfaced interview.2023 November 21, Issy Ronald, “Is this Banksy’s real name? Resurfaced interview suggests it could be”, in CNN. From the entry resurface
  • Cachet powers the often elusive concept “cool”; nothing can be cool without associations to particular groups of high-status individuals, namely, musicians, celebrities, and popular teens.2022, W. David Marx, chapter 3, in Status and Culture, Viking, →ISBN. From the entry cachet
  • In this paper we study the structure of quasiprimitive and biquasiprimitive 2'-elusive permutation groups, extending earlier work of Giudici and Xu on elusive groups.2016, Timothy C. Burness, Michael Giudici, “Permutation groups and derangements of odd prime order”, in arXiv. From the entry quasiprimitive
  • The next day, after an early dingo's breakfast, which consists only of water, we headed out to chase down the elusive swine.2016, Matt Chadwick, Dirt Classroom, page 39. From the entry dingo's breakfast
  • This website is a tribute to the famous but elusive Bell Curve God that everyone has heard of but has never seen.2013 July 31, “Bell Curve God”, in Orbital: Project Gemini, National University of Singapore, archived from the original on 11 Nov 2013. From the entry bell curve god
  • In particle physics, that system is uninspiringly called the Standard Model, which accounts for all known matter but has one gap: the elusive Higgs boson.2009 August 9, James Glanz, “When Mortals Work on Cosmic Time”, in New York Times. From the entry uninspiringly

Meaning of elusive

  1. adjective Evading capture, comprehension or remembrance.
  2. adjective Difficult to make precise.
  3. adjective Rarely seen.

Full definition of elusive

Questions about elusive in a sentence

How do you use elusive in a sentence?
Elusive is used as an adjective. For example: “It's the very first time such an elusive bird has been caught on film.”
What is a short sentence with elusive?
“The elusive criminal was arrested”
What does elusive mean?
Elusive means evading capture, comprehension or remembrance.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: elusive (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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