How to use glean in a sentence

20 example sentences · verb, noun

Glean means to collect (fruit, grain, or other produce) from a field, an orchard, etc., after the main gathering or harvest. Example: “Some harvest loss was gleaned by animals, although little information is available on the proportion of harvest loss gleaned and no hard data is available on the quantity.”

Examples of glean by meaning

verbTo collect (fruit, grain, or other produce) from a field, an orchard, etc., after the main gathering or harvest.

Some harvest loss was gleaned by animals, although little information is available on the proportion of harvest loss gleaned and no hard data is available on the quantity.1977 September 16, Elmer Boyd Staats, Comptroller General, “Food Loss”, in Food Waste: An Opportunity to Improve Resource Use: Report to...

verbOf an animal, especially a bat or a bird: to feed by picking up or plucking (prey, mainly arthropods such as insects)...

Frigate birds glean a portion of their livelihood from the host of creatures which live at the surface of the ocean: flying-fishes, ctenophores, jelly-fishes, velela, janthina, and in fact anything that may attract their fancy.1904 May–June, Walter K[enrick] Fisher, “The Home Life of a Buccaneer”, in Walter K. Fisher, editor, The Condor: A Magazine of Western...
Seen traveling and foraging in noisy flocks of 5 to 30 or more birds, gleaning insects, eggs, and larvae from shrubs and trees.2006, “Bushtits [Bushtit: Psaltriparus minimus L]”, in Jonathan Alderfer, editor, National Geographic Field Guide to Birds: Washington &...

More sentences with glean

Each gleans the structure of its respective language, developing an internal representation known as a latent space.2024 March 19, George Musser, “A Truly Intelligent Machine. [Online title and tagline: "Building Intelligent Machines Helps Us Learn How…. From the entry word cloud
Both iiwis and apapanes also consume arthropods by gleaning and occasionally flycatching (pers. observ.).2021, Laura Landweber, Andrew Dobson, Genetics and the Extinction of Species, page 144. From the entry apapane
And, eventually, the newly gleaned information could inform how the company will make brewskis for Mars.2017 December 11, Jackie Wattles, “SpaceX is sending barley to space for Budweiser research”, in CNN Business, archived from the original…. From the entry brewski
A city can’t expect its residents to glean its code through Borglike assimilation.2004 October 29, Carol McAlice Currie, “Unposted laws make downtown seem unwelcoming”, in Statesman Journal, volume 152, number 214…. From the entry Borglike
Much of the information about a group can be gleaned from a study of its subgroups.1990, Peter B. Kleidman, Martin W. Liebeck, The Subgroup Structure of the Finite Classical Groups, Cambridge University Press, page 1. From the entry subgroup
I had gleaned some of the smoke talk of the natives.1944 November 18, The World's News, Sydney, page 19, column 3. From the entry smoke-talk
And they have gleaned location data from license-plate reader databases that can be used to track where people drive.2022 September 15, Drew Harwell, “DHS built huge database from cellphones, computers seized at border”, in The Washington Post…. From the entry tap
Day after day they read materials and then round-tabled the value of what they could glean from them.2010, Claudette Rothman, Gerald L. Jones, Greenwich Secrets, Xlibris Corporation, →ISBN, page 314. From the entry round-table
The various ratchings of the torture wheel require what was gleaned before; but it is a descent of asking, not answering.2000, Michael Gelven, The Asking Mystery: A Philosophical Inquiry, page 169. From the entry ratching
A so-called "successful failure" is one where important lessons can be gleaned for future tests and where the risks of harm are low, experts say.2023 April 21, Li Zhou, “Why SpaceX doesn't see its rocket explosion as a failure. Experts also viewed the test as a valuable way to see…. From the entry failure
Such studies are only now beginning in bioarcheology but important insights into modern diseases are likely to be gleaned from analyses of bioarcheological specimens.2015 August 6, Otto Appenzeller et al., “Bioarcheology: Medicine, Biology, and Forensic Sciences”, in BioMed Research International…. From the entry bioarcheology
To put food on the table, Ruth gleaned in the fields and one of the fields belonged to Boaz who noticed her and admired her.2000, Earl F. Lehman, The God Bu$ine$$, page 59. From the entry begat
There is also a sense in which particular Zeitgeister may have an impact upon facets of the results that are gleaned from an empirical study.1996, Leslie J. Francis, Susan H. Jones, Psychological Perspectives on Christian Ministry: A Reader, page 58. From the entry zeitgeister
But when I had crossed the threshold, I was astonished at the paucity of facts to be gleaned from the inmates themselves.1915, Anna Katharine Green, The Golden Slipper, problem 7. From the entry paucity
Like treeshrews, elephant shrews are active for half of the twenty-four-hour day, implying that this type of general invertebrate gleaning requires long foraging times in both families.2011, Louise H Emmons, Tupai: A Field Study of Bornean Treeshrews, page 221. From the entry elephant shrew
He gleaned the buoyant and fervent élan of the Puertorriqueños and Neo-Ricans with warmth and enthusiasm, though he did not shy away from the brutalities the people suffered.1974, Stan Steiner, “Sources: An Intimate Assay”, in The Islands: The Worlds of the Puerto Ricans, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Row, →ISBN. From the entry Neo-Rican
Speaking of his work on the cephalopods as a whole, Thompson says: “ This is far more than a mass of fragmentary observations gleaned from fishermen.1925, William A. Locy, The Growth of Biology, Henry Holt and Company, page 28. From the entry fragmentary

Meaning of glean

verb To collect (fruit, grain, or other produce) from a field, an orchard, etc., after the main gathering or harvest.
verb To gather (something, now chiefly something intangible such as experience or information) in small amounts over a period of time, often with some difficulty; to scrape together.
verb To take away (someone's) possessions; to strip (someone) bare.

Full definition of glean

Questions about glean in a sentence

How do you use glean in a sentence?: Glean is used as a verb and noun. For example: “Some harvest loss was gleaned by animals, although little information is available on the proportion of harvest loss gleaned and no hard data is available on the quantity.”
What is a short sentence with glean?: “I had gleaned some of the smoke talk of the natives.”
What does glean mean?: Glean means to collect (fruit, grain, or other produce) from a field, an orchard, etc., after the main gathering or harvest.

Adapted from Wiktionary: glean (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: 2026-09-02

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