How to use paraphrase in a sentence

32 example sentences · noun, verb

Paraphrase means a restatement of a text in different words, often to clarify meaning or from memory rather than verbatim. Example: “The article included a brief paraphrase of the speech.”

Examples of paraphrase by meaning

nounA restatement of a text in different words, often to clarify meaning or from memory rather than verbatim.

The article included a brief paraphrase of the speech.

verbTo restate something as, or to compose a paraphrase. To repeat a written or spoken phrase/quote using different words...

She asked the student to paraphrase the passage.
Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text.2026 July 8, Rose Horowitch, “The End of Reading Is Here”, in Jeffrey Goldberg, editor, The Atlantic, Washington, D.C.: The Atlantic...

More sentences with paraphrase

The therapist paraphrased nonjudgmentally what the client had said.From the entry nonjudgmentally
“"Not a human, not yet a vampire," to paraphrase one of your contemporary musical troubadours.”2023 August 17, Jeremy Levick & Rajat Suresh, “Hybrid Creatures” (0:18 from the start), in What We Do in the Shadows, season 5, episode 7…. From the entry troubadour
To paraphrase a popular Internet meme, share your movie or it didn't happen.2014, Jeff Carlson, iPad and iPhone Video: Film, Edit, and Share the Apple Way, Peachpit Press, →ISBN, page 145. From the entry or it didn't happen
Any locution offered as the natural-language paraphrase of contentual quantification can be read in another way.2008, Ryan Christensen, Minimal truth, page 74. From the entry contentual
And wussification, to paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, is political correctness's little sister.2007, Kinky Friedman, You Can Lead a Politician to Water, But You Can't Make Him Think, →ISBN, page 51. From the entry wussification
Obviously, the "luster" of the Clarissan diamond is best perceived against these "common stones", to paraphrase Johnson.2005, Martha J. Koehler, Models of Reading: Paragons and Parasites in Richardson, Burney, and Laclos, page 138. From the entry Clarissan
Why, to paraphrase Susan Coates (personal communication), are some people "more gendery" than others?2004, Lynne Layton, Who's That Girl? Who's That Boy?: Clinical Practice Meets Postmodern Gender Theory, unnumbered page. From the entry gendery
To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, "It is the humanness that makes a business great, not the 'businessness.'"2004, Mark Sanborn, The Fred Factor: How Passion In Your Work and Life Can Turn the Ordinary into the Extraordinary, New York, N.Y.; […]…. From the entry businessness
I'm totally paraphrasing here, but the whole "points" thing spooked me a bit, seemed MLMish to me.2003 May 3, Jester, “Re: Merchant accounts? Looong”, in alt.wholesale (Usenet). From the entry MLMish
Stylisticians have often argued that meaning is lost when a literary text is paraphrased or summarized.2002, Max Louwerse, Willie Van Peer, Thematics: Interdisciplinary Studies, page 91. From the entry stylistician
In (3)-(8) unambiguous paraphrases in English were given; perhaps structurally unambiguous paraphrases in English are always available.2001, Mark Sainsbury, chapter 1, in Logical Forms — An Introduction to Philosophical Logic, 2nd edition, Blackwell Publishing, →ISBN, §12…. From the entry artificial language
To paraphrase a renowned pigskin philosopher, speed is not everything, it is the only thing.1998, Kenneth Judd, Numerical Methods in Economics, MIT Press, →ISBN, page 29. From the entry pigskin
To paraphrase Goethe, he who misfastens the first button will have trouble buttoning up his shirt.1990, F. Neubauer, Portfolio Management, page 39. From the entry misfasten
Any paraphrase that even slightly misinflects his descriptions runs the risk of near-total distortion.1989 ·, Richard Fleming, Michael Payne, The Senses of Stanley Cavell, page 234. From the entry misinflect
Jacob Kopelman of Brisk, Lithuania, paraphrased in verse the Aramaic translations of the five scrolls.1929, Abraham Zevi Idelsohn, Jewish Music: Its Historical Development, page 438. From the entry brisk
But, to paraphrase the sweet and stout-hearted Bilbo himself, this adventure won’t just make you late for dinner.2012 December 15, Ann Hornaday, “‘The Hobbit’ Is Long, Feels Even Longer”, in Valley News, volume 61, number 190, page C3, column 4. From the entry weak
I conclude that there is good reason to suspect that adverbialist paraphrases are in fact conservative rather than revisionary.2008 August 5, Uriah Kriegel, “The dispensability of (merely) intentional objects”, in Philosophical Studies, volume 141, number 1, →DOI. From the entry revisionary
These tortured phrases, e.g. flag to clamor instead of signal to noise, are the results of paraphrasing tools used to escape plagiarism detection.2024 February 2, Martel, Eléna; Lentschat, Martin; Labbé, Cyril, “Detection of tortured phrases in scientific literature”, in arXiv, →DOI. From the entry tortured phrase
Whether they're acts of clickbaiting or dumbness, internet headlines routinely mischaracterize quotes, inaccurately paraphrase statements, and misuse specific terms, all to make readers click.2015, How to Write About Music, →ISBN, page 60. From the entry clickbait
Just play like 'im!" So lesson number one is that it ain't the meat, it's the motion, to paraphrase the old blues tune.1985, Sonic Options Network, Option, page 15. From the entry it ain't the meat, it's the motion
It is a purely academic outrage: Froude’s Bowdlerisations of Gloriana’s good things, which the historian paraphrased loosely when he should have transcribed them accurately.1924 February 23, J[ames] D[avid] Symon, “Books of the Day”, in The Illustrated London News, London: The Illustrated London News and…. From the entry Gloriana
The kook we will always have with us, to paraphrase Jesus, but the kooks of yore had to work to maintain their kookery and locate fellow kooks.2019 January 29, Tom Bissell, “An Anti-Facebook Manifesto”, in New York Times. From the entry kook
David Ige, opening their mouths to sputter (paraphrasing here) — golly gee, we don’t know what happened, but we plan to find out — mea culpas.2018 January 13, Tad Bartimus, “When There’s Nuke Headed Your Way, ‘Do What You Gotta Do’”, in Civil Beat. From the entry mea culpa
To subjectively paraphrase Shakespeare, a noisy, consumer-grade leaf blower is a device used “by an idiot, full of sound and fury, and that does almost nothing.”2016, William Gurstelle, Ready the Cannons!: Build Wiffle Ball Launchers, Beverage Bottle Bazookas, Hydro Swivel Guns, and Other Artisanal…. From the entry leaf blower
A quite accurate but clumsy paraphrase of this rhetorical question could be “Your attempt to find out the searchables of the unsearchable God is doomed to failure”.2015, Reuven Tsur, On the Shore of Nothingness. From the entry searchable
He wrote it down, remembering a quip of Pym's, paraphrased from Clemenceau: "Military intelligence has as much to do with intelligence as military music has to do with music.”1986, John le Carré, A Perfect Spy. From the entry quip
"To paraphrase the ecologist Garett Hardin: If an embryo or fetus is a human being, then an acorn is an oak tree, and an egg a chicken.1986, Carl Djerassi, “Abortion in the United States: politics or policy?”, in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, volume 42, number 4, page…. From the entry gallicide
'Rhochrematics is not so much a technique but more a way of life, to paraphrase a well known saying,' said Mr Phillips when addressing the members on 6 November.1974, Management Services - Volume 18, page 35. From the entry rhochrematics
Those who endorse the A-theory of time, for example, often attempt to show that tense is ineliminable, i. e., it is impossible to adequately paraphrase tensed sentences into tenseless ones.2008 August 27, Kevin Dewan, “Review of Heather Dyke, Metaphysics and the Representational Fallacy”, in Erkenntnis, volume 69, number 2…. From the entry tenseless

Meaning of paraphrase

noun A restatement of a text in different words, often to clarify meaning or from memory rather than verbatim.
noun One of a certain number of Scripture passages turned into verse for use in the service of praise.
verb To restate something as, or to compose a paraphrase. To repeat a written or spoken phrase/quote using different words, often in a simpler and shorter form, or sometimes in a humorous context.

Full definition of paraphrase

Questions about paraphrase in a sentence

How do you use paraphrase in a sentence?: Paraphrase is used as a noun and verb. For example: “The article included a brief paraphrase of the speech.”
What is a short sentence with paraphrase?: “She asked the student to paraphrase the passage.”
What does paraphrase mean?: Paraphrase means a restatement of a text in different words, often to clarify meaning or from memory rather than verbatim.

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