Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use recourse in a sentence

27 example sentences · noun, verb

Recourse means the act of seeking assistance or advice. Example: “Tarzan would have liked to subdue the ugly beast without recourse to knife or arrows.”

Examples of recourse by meaning

nounThe use of (someone or something) as a source of help in a difficult situation.

  • Tarzan would have liked to subdue the ugly beast without recourse to knife or arrows.1912 October, Edgar Rice Burroughs, “Tarzan of the Apes”, in The All-Story, New York, N.Y.: Frank A. Munsey Co., →OCLC; republished as...
  • In other cases, such running powers have been granted without recourse to Parliament, by voluntary agreement between the parties.1940 May, “The Why and the Wherefore: Running Powers”, in Railway Magazine, page 318

More sentences with recourse

  • Victims of rug pulls are often left with little recourse against nameless thieves.2022 March 2, David Yaffe-Bellany, “Millions for Crypto Start-Ups, No Real Names Necessary”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from…. From the entry nameless
  • The superior rulemaker's only recourse is to impose sanctions against the inferior rulemaker.2019, Johan Lindholm, “7: CAS's normative contribution”, in The Court of Arbitration for Sport and Its Jurisprudence: An Empirical Inquiry…. From the entry rulemaker
  • Directly after the return to democracy, a recourse of inconstitutionality was submitted to the Supreme Court.2015, Annelen Micus, The Inter-American Human Rights System as a Safeguard for Justice in National Transitions, page 279. From the entry inconstitutionality
  • Suffice it to say that the recourse to nuclear energy magnifies the problems of fossilism.1998, David Bell, Roger Keil, Political Ecology: Global and Local, page 41. From the entry fossilism
  • Nature scarcely ever gives us the very best—for that we must have recourse to art.1993, Baltasar Gracián, translated by Joseph Jacobs, The Art of Worldly Wisdom. From the entry scarcely
  • Sabid and all other important members now had no recourse but to withdraw to Ying-chi-sha.1946 December 5, Military Information: Sinkiang Rebellions 1931-1937, page 9. From the entry Ying-chi-sha
  • It’s the ultimate recourse for a cop who doesn't like somebody who's looking at him the wrong way.2015 April 29, “David Simon on Baltimore’s Anguish”, in The Marshall Project. From the entry humble
  • This got me wondering, is there any comeback for the doorer, and is there any recourse for the dooree?2014 January 28, Honour Tomkinson, “Oxford cycling campaigner Honour Tomkinson will be sticking to cycling along the canal path...”, in…. From the entry doorer
  • At other times, in complete contrast, as noted elsewhere (Section 7.3), there is frequent recourse to slang and informalisms.2003, Alan Partington, The Linguistics of Political Argument, page 213. From the entry informalism
  • Until they do, the only recourse is the arcane art of ampelography, in which the vines are identified by physical appearance.1993 October 17, Arthur Lubow, “What's Killing the Grapevines of Napa?”, in The New York Times, →ISSN. From the entry ampelography
  • The only recourse was to quaff his one as of yet unidentified potion and hope it was extra healing.1993, Robert Leduc, “Nethack Imitates Life”, in rec.games.hack (Usenet). From the entry rothe
  • Meanwhile, womanhating as a recourse of the powerless is sapping strength from black communities, and our very lives.1984, Audre Lorde, “I Am Your Sister”, in Let Nobody Turn Us Around, page 520. From the entry womanhating
  • If you have permission to enter or stay in the UK, it may include a no recourse to public funds (NRPF) condition.2025 April 9, “Guidance: Public funds”, in GOV.UK, archived from the original on 27 Jun 2025. From the entry public funds
  • More importantly, the rehearsing of that information has been almost completely uncritical, indicating a lack of recourse to any further information about the term.2014, James Lambert, “A Much Tortured Expression: A New Look At `Hobson-Jobson'”, in International Journal of Lexicography, volume 27…. From the entry uncritical
  • This lack of familiarity, inexperience and knowledge imbalance heightens the potential for misbuying and so consumers have for many years made recourse to financial advice.2013, Christine Ennew, Nigel Waite, Roisin Waite, Financial Services Marketing. From the entry misbuying
  • Melville "repels" here; he is guilty of "wordmongering," prolixity, and recourse to "marvellous" yarns that erode what is usefully "probable" in the narrative.2008, Harold Bloom, Herman Melville. From the entry wordmongering
  • The negotiations to achieve this were bitterly contested and were characterised by regular recourse to m'learned friends and by brinkmanship on both sides.2002 October 1, Brian Elliot, Aspects of Barnsley 7: Discovering Local History, Casemate Publishers, →ISBN. From the entry m'learned friends
  • The father is more apt to have recourse to relatively distant paternal kin or to his own maternal kin than to his own affines.1985, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “The Name ‘Remade’”, in Lydia Cochrane, transl., Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, paperback…. From the entry maternal
  • After recourse to work of Rush and Shi mapping the anatomy of the lattice isomorphism, the upshot is a uniform proof that the cardinality statistic exhibits homomesy.2015, David B. Rush, Kelvin Wang, “On Orbits of Order Ideals of Minuscule Posets II: Homomesy”, in arXiv. From the entry homomesic
  • Yet more surprising are the results if recourse be had to the table, for rapping, or to the psychograph, requiring, it is true, longer practice than the divinging rod.2012, Eduard von Hartmann, C. C. Massey, Spiritism, →ISBN, page 66. From the entry psychograph
  • And then came others, possessing weaponry and a sophisticated support before which tribes in dense jungles had no recourse: European concessionaires and feckless traders, brutish exploiters and enslavers.2009 March 30, Edward Rothstein, “Casting a Sliver of Light on the Heart of Darkness”, in The New York Times, archived from the original…. From the entry exploiter
  • Because McVoy was trying to avoid recourse to the “customer solution” of NT, that left the programmers' solution: free software, or “sourceware,” as he termed it.2009, Glyn Moody, Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Hachette UK, →ISBN. From the entry sourceware
  • The southern relationship was a slaveholder-physician dyad, with the slave left outside, unconsulted, uninformed, and with no recourse if she or he was unsatisfied, injured, or killed—a medical nonentity.2008, Harriet A. Washington, “Southern Discomfort”, in Medical Apartheid, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, page 64. From the entry dyad
  • His recourse to written documents to make his discourse unassailable has created a virtually unalterable situation even as he is on the verge of being forced to “see through” Tartuffe.1990, Larry W. Riggs, “Moliere’s “Poststructuralism”: Demolition of Transcendentalist Discourse in Le Tartuffe”, in Symposium: A Quarterly…. From the entry unassailable
  • Among the aristocracy of eighteenth-century Europe, recourse to what is now called gerocomy was in vogue, both in Paris and London, for the rehabilitation of the victims of old age.1978, Benjamin Walker, Encyclopedia of Metaphysical Medicine, Routledge, page 261. From the entry gerocomy

Meaning of recourse

  1. noun The act of seeking assistance or advice.
  2. noun The use of (someone or something) as a source of help in a difficult situation.
  3. noun A coursing back, or coursing again; renewed course; return; retreat; recurrence.

Full definition of recourse

Questions about recourse in a sentence

How do you use recourse in a sentence?
Recourse is used as a noun and verb. For example: “Tarzan would have liked to subdue the ugly beast without recourse to knife or arrows.”
What is a short sentence with recourse?
“The superior rulemaker's only recourse is to impose sanctions against the inferior rulemaker.”
What does recourse mean?
Recourse means the act of seeking assistance or advice.

Source and license

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