Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use qua in a sentence

14 example sentences · preposition, interjection

Qua means as; in the capacity of; acting as. Example: “The ginger flavor adds such a nice je ne sais qua to the cake.”

Examples of qua by meaning

prepositionAs; in the capacity of; acting as.

  • It was qua poet that Byron resurrected the exploded and discarded immortal Christian soul by bodying it forth through the notion of soul conceived as poetic imagination.2003, Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, Penguin, published 2004, page 458
  • Sometimes, though, you pick up a novel and it makes your skin prickle — not necessarily because it’s a great novel qua novel, which you can’t know until the end, but because of the velocity of its microperceptions.2022 March 29, Dwight Garner, “In Jennifer Egan’s New Novel, Our Memories Are Available for All to See”, in The New York Times, →ISSN...

More sentences with qua

  • The ginger flavor adds such a nice je ne sais qua to the cake.From the entry je ne sais qua
  • He's missing that je ne sais qua which separates winners from champions.From the entry je ne sais qua
  • For any new religious movement to have legs, a sine qua non is the undisprovability of its tenets.From the entry undisprovability
  • Being qua being is being which is not determined simply to this or that dimension.1958, Eugen Biser, Philosophy Today Summer 1958: Volume 2, Issue 2, Philosophy Documentation Center, page 80. From the entry ultradimensional
  • Literature, instead of being an accessory, is the fundamental sine qua non of complete living.1909, Arnold Bennett, chapter I, in Literary Taste: How to Form It. From the entry sine qua non
  • This expansivist view is presidency-weighted, regarding the maximization of presidential power as virtually the sine qua non of American politics.1989, William F. Grover, The President as Prisoner, page 18. From the entry expansivist
  • This relevance can in many cases, as here, be tested by the sine qua non or ‘but for’ rule.1985, Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart, Tony Honoré, Causation in the Law, page xlv. From the entry but for
  • Permanent scepsis is, after all, the condition sine qua non of not only philosophy but also of all true social action.1973, Praxis, volume 9/10, page 91. From the entry scepsis
  • Some of these arguments appeal to the religious traditions, and thus suggest that a believer qua believer (rather than qua historian) has to be originalist.2009, Holy Writ: interpretation in law and religion, page 56. From the entry originalist
  • This represents a metalinguistic use of Mary: the case where we cite a linguistic expression in order to say something about it qua linguistic expression.2002, Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. From the entry metalinguistic
  • When Aristotle says that first philosophy is the science of being qua being, he gives metaphysics the task of being a science of the whole.1958, Eugen Biser, Philosophy Today Summer 1958: Volume 2, Issue 2, Philosophy Documentation Center, page 80. From the entry ultradimensional
  • There were no exclusive canons of art and literature; experimentation was allowed, and direct glorification of the regime or its leader was not a sine qua non of publication.1978 [1976], Leszek Kołakowski, translated by P[aul] S[teven] Falla, Main Currents of Marxism, volume III: The Breakdown, Oxford…. From the entry glorification

Meaning of qua

  1. preposition As; in the capacity of; acting as.
  2. interjection The cawing sound of a crow.

Full definition of qua

Questions about qua in a sentence

How do you use qua in a sentence?
Qua is used as a preposition and interjection. For example: “The ginger flavor adds such a nice je ne sais qua to the cake.”
What is a short sentence with qua?
“He's missing that je ne sais qua which separates winners from champions.”
What does qua mean?
Qua means as; in the capacity of; acting as.

Source and license

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