Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use onerous in a sentence

12 example sentences · adjective

Onerous means imposing or constituting a physical, mental, or figurative load which can be borne only with effort; burdensome. Example: “The striker's job was onerous, too, because there was so little "give" in the metal, and the perpetual jarring was indeed trying to the muscles.”

Examples of onerous by meaning

adjectiveImposing or constituting a physical, mental, or figurative load which can be borne only with effort; burdensome.

  • The striker's job was onerous, too, because there was so little "give" in the metal, and the perpetual jarring was indeed trying to the muscles.1945 January and February, A Former Pupil, “Some Memories of Crewe Works—III”, in Railway Magazine, page 13
  • People with diabetes mellitus rely predominantly on finger pricking to measure blood levels of glucose, which can be onerous.2024 June, “A novel system for non-invasive measurement of blood levels of glucose”, in Nature Reviews Endocrinology, volume 20, →DOI, page...

More sentences with onerous

  • But the relaxation of a few miscalibrated, onerous provisions is where this effort should end.2007 January 2, “Holding the Line”, in New York Times. From the entry miscalibrate
  • So onerous that the dread word “genocide” is being supplanted by even more ominous words—“omnicide” and “geocide.”1989, L. S. Stavrianos, Lifelines from Our Past: A New World History, New York: Pantheon Books, page 238. From the entry omnicide
  • In view of Clement’s advanced age and busy legal practice, the demands of the escheatery must have been onerous for him.2014, Christopher Starr, “Escheator”, in Medieval Lawyer: Clement Spice of Essex, Essex Society for Archaeology and History, →ISBN, page 85. From the entry escheatery
  • What had been a trusty sluff job was now as onerous as swinging a Kaiser blade or shoveling out ditches.2013, Ron Rash, Nothing Gold Can Stay: Stories, Harper Collins, →ISBN. From the entry kaiser blade
  • There were also services such as wainage, which may have been very onerous, but were not obligations of a servile character.1916, James Maclehose, The Scottish Historical Review - Volume 13, page 184. From the entry wainage
  • Ewing thinks this type of managed retreat will become more common as people start to understand the onerous cost of relentless nourishment.2017 April 18, “Sunken Pleasure”, in Scientific American. From the entry managed retreat
  • But since the high technology of capitalism and the whip of the marketplace have become so efficient, the price has become correspondingly onerous.1989, L. S. Stavrianos, Lifelines from Our Past: A New World History, New York: Pantheon Books, page 238. From the entry omnicide
  • Dentists who eschew all the onerous tasks of dentistry and will do nothing except extract teeth and make dentures sometimes are guilty of tomomania.1951, The Journal of the Michigan State Dental Association. From the entry tomomania
  • "It is one of the pleasant if quite onerous duties of a man of my position to requite the services he receives—usually on a disproportionately extravagant scale."1938 May, Evelyn Waugh, chapter 4, in Scoop: A Novel about Journalists, uniform edition, London: Chapman & Hall, published 1948 (1951…. From the entry requite
  • Remember, the key here is that you know that this is it, the last copy; there will be no more chances to revise, no typist to complete this onerous task.1977, Bill Knott, The Craft of Fiction, page 6. From the entry this is it

Meaning of onerous

  1. adjective Imposing or constituting a physical, mental, or figurative load which can be borne only with effort; burdensome.

Full definition of onerous

Questions about onerous in a sentence

How do you use onerous in a sentence?
Onerous is used as an adjective. For example: “The striker's job was onerous, too, because there was so little "give" in the metal, and the perpetual jarring was indeed trying to the muscles.”
What is a short sentence with onerous?
“But the relaxation of a few miscalibrated, onerous provisions is where this effort should end.”
What does onerous mean?
Onerous means imposing or constituting a physical, mental, or figurative load which can be borne only with effort; burdensome.

Source and license

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