Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use hostile in a sentence

40 example sentences · adjective, noun

Hostile means not friendly; appropriate to an enemy; showing the disposition of an enemy; showing ill will and malevolence or a desire to thwart and injure. Example: “Microsoft may go hostile in its bid for Yahoo! as soon as Friday, according to a published report.”

Examples of hostile by meaning

adjectiveNot friendly; appropriate to an enemy; showing the disposition of an enemy; showing ill will and malevolence or a...

  • a hostile force
  • a hostile country
  • hostile to a sudden change

adjectiveBeing or relating to a hostile takeover.

  • Microsoft may go hostile in its bid for Yahoo! as soon as Friday, according to a published report.

More sentences with hostile

  • Typically, a hostile mob will add whenever it's within the aggro radius of a player.From the entry add
  • Get your guns ready: intel said there'd be no hostiles in the area, but it looks like we've got company.From the entry company
  • The suspects' hostile interrogation amounted to a public crucifixion.From the entry crucifixion
  • The hostile forces were at an impasse; neither could attack with enough force and still defend against the retaliatory counterattack.From the entry retaliatory
  • He was suspicious, standoffish, taciturn; in a word, hostile.From the entry in a word
  • As if the hostile takeover weren't enough, to add insult to injury they scrapped ninety percent of our products and replaced them with their own.From the entry add insult to injury
  • The Department for Transport has been particularly hostile, seeing it as little more than cherry-picking.2023 February 22, Sir Michael Holden, “Comment: A farewell to micro-management”, in RAIL, number 977, page 3. From the entry seismic
  • Britain would become “a hostile principality, built on social, fiscal and environmental deregulation.”2019 June 13, Jon Henley, “'Mini-Trump across the Channel': EU media on Boris Johnson as British PM”, in The Guardian, →ISSN. From the entry johnson
  • A few widely publicized companies set up ESOPs purely as defenses against hostile takeovers.2016 September 8, John Case, “The Life-Changing Magic of Turning Employees Into Shareholders”, in The Atlantic. From the entry ESOP
  • Martial arts were developed for fighting, but studying them doesn't make the practitioner a hostile individual.2015, Noel Plaugher, “Martial Postures”, in Standing Qigong for Health and Martial Arts: Zhan Zhuang, London; Philadelphia, Pa.: Singing…. From the entry martial
  • Vegans are variously stereotyped as ascetics, faddists, sentimentalists, or in some cases, hostile extremists.2011 March, Matthew Cole, Karen Morgan, “Vegaphobia: derogatory discourses of veganism and the reproduction of speciesism in UK national…. From the entry vegaphobia
  • In any other context, a clenched fist would be perceived as hostile.2008 June 5, M.J. Stephey, “A Brief History of the Fist Bump”, in Time, archived from the original on 08 Jul 2008. From the entry fist bump
  • Their subject — hostile corporate takeovers — seems far from cyberprivacy, but it is not.2007 December 23, Christopher Caldwell, “Intimate Shopping”, in New York Times. From the entry cyberprivacy
  • Next time, withdraw slowly from your recreational medicine so you don't become hostile and delusioned.2007 August 12, larry moe 'n curly, “Re: OT Clinton: Get educated, drop the rhetoric”, in alt.autos.toyota (Usenet), retrieved 19 Apr 2022. From the entry recreational medicine
  • Harassive in this context meaning - hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive.2006, Equality Commission for Northern Ireland, Harassment & Bullying in the Workplace. From the entry harassive
  • The FBI had already had a brush with a cult group's hostile use of a pathogen.2004, Jeanne Guillemin, Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism, Columbia…. From the entry Rajneeshee
  • As understood by Leibniz and his followers, computationism was explicitly hostile to all versions of materialism.2003, The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, page 13. From the entry rationally
  • Even outside the Anglo-Saxon world, underperforming public companies have become vulnerable to hostile takeover.2002, Robert M. Grant, Contemporary Strategy Analysis: Concepts, Techniques, Applications, page 40. From the entry underperform
  • Many mistake my approach as hostile to the sacrosanct memory of J.2001, Neal Hallford, Jana Hallford, Swords and circuitry: a designer's guide to computer role playing games, page 207. From the entry worldbuilder
  • Having been in a university environment that was incredibly hostile to women, coming here seems like heaven.1996, William G. Tierney, Estela Mara Bensimon, Promotion and Tenure: Community and Socialization in Academe, page 96. From the entry token
  • The Cyclopses thus initially assume that Polyphemus's suffering has been intentionally inflicted by some hostile figure.1993, Mette Hjort, The Strategy of Letters, Harvard University Press, →ISBN, page 2. From the entry cyclops
  • There is a ghouly feeling of alarming hostile vibrations in many parts of Los Padres.1982, Evelyn Eaton, “Part Four”, in The Shaman and the Medicine Wheel, Wheaton, Ill.: The Theosophical Publishing House, →ISBN, pages…. From the entry ghouly
  • Defendants argued that plaintiffs' allegations of hostile discrimination are entirely conclusionary.1967, Federal Supplement. From the entry conclusionary
  • Both bills provide for a new cold war hostile fire pay, similar to wartime combat pay.1963 August 7, “Now It's Up To House: All Senators OK Fatter Service Pay Checks Oct. 1”, in Spartanburg Herald Journal, USA, retrieved 14…. From the entry combat pay
  • Interracial relations in Sikang are by no means entirely hostile, however.1963, A. Doak Barnett, China on the Eve of Communist Takeover, Frederick A. Praeger, →LCCN, →OCLC, →OL, page 225. From the entry Kangting
  • How may I withspeak the hostile word or find an answer to my foes?1910, Cynewulf, Charles W. Kennedy, Ph.D, The poems of Cynewulf, page 158. From the entry withspeak
  • Moving from Salem would mean leaving extended family, but she said the small city has grown too hostile to stay.2025 November 19, Raphael Satter and A.J. Vicens, “The Charlie Kirk purge: How 600 Americans were punished in a pro-Trump crackdown”, in…. From the entry Salem
  • Many face harassment from a hostile cohort of Swifties known as Hetlors, notorious for a queerphobic insistence that Taylor is straight.2023 August 31, Frankie de la Cretaz, “Postcard from Camp Gaylore”, in Cosmopolitan. From the entry queerphobic
  • Illogical pedestrian crossings, inaccessible pavements and inconvenient public transport make it rather hostile for its differently abled citizens.2022 May 24, “Is Chennai convenient for its Differently-abled citizens?”, in The Hindu. From the entry differently able
  • During Jhengs’ ruling, because of their hostile attitude toward the Cing government, immigrants were less than the Holland-occupation period.(Can we date this quote?), “Dawn”, in taiwanschoolnet.org, archived from the original on 15 Sep 2022. From the entry Jhangjhou
  • Hostile forces are putting pressure on our people.2017, BioWare, Mass Effect: Andromeda (Science Fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →OCLC, PC, scene: Disrupt Enemy Supplies. From the entry pressure
  • It has been a colossal error by Davos Man left-wingers to think of nation-states as embarrassing anachronisms hostile to democracy.2017 March 28, Alan Johnson, “Why Brexit Is Best for Britain: The Left-Wing Case”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 09…. From the entry anachronism
  • Hostile race relations and chronic unemployment are ignored in the suburbs of Paris, London and Sydney, and boom! there are riots.2013, Peter Westoby, Gerard Dowling, Theory and Practice of Dialogical Community Development. From the entry boom
  • Saint-Simon was certainly a radical, and hostile to inherited privilege, but his bourgeois 'socialism' was of a patrician kind.2013 July 18, Doctor Martin Parker, Valerie Fournier, Patrick Reedy, The Dictionary of Alternatives: Utopianism and Organization, Zed…. From the entry patrician
  • At times, there was a hostile entitledness about him.2013, Susan Miller, Shame in Context, Routledge, →ISBN, page 113. From the entry entitledness
  • Being uncircumcised means being non-Jewish and hostile.2011, Benedikt Eckhardt, Jewish Identity and Politics between the Maccabees and Bar Kokhba, →ISBN. From the entry uncircumcised

Meaning of hostile

  1. adjective Not friendly; appropriate to an enemy; showing the disposition of an enemy; showing ill will and malevolence or a desire to thwart and injure.
  2. adjective Aggressive; antagonistic.
  3. adjective Unwilling.

Full definition of hostile

Questions about hostile in a sentence

How do you use hostile in a sentence?
Hostile is used as an adjective and noun. For example: “Microsoft may go hostile in its bid for Yahoo! as soon as Friday, according to a published report.”
What is a short sentence with hostile?
“a hostile country”
What does hostile mean?
Hostile means not friendly; appropriate to an enemy; showing the disposition of an enemy; showing ill will and malevolence or a desire to thwart and injure.

Source and license

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