Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use rote in a sentence

12 example sentences · noun, adjective, verb

Rote means mechanical routine; a fixed, habitual, repetitive, or mechanical course of procedure. Example: “The pastoral scenes from those commercials don’t bear too much resemblance to the rote of daily life on a farm.”

Examples of rote by meaning

nounMechanical routine; a fixed, habitual, repetitive, or mechanical course of procedure.

  • The pastoral scenes from those commercials don’t bear too much resemblance to the rote of daily life on a farm.
  • He could perform by rote any of his roles in Shakespeare.

adjectiveBy repetition or practice and without much thought.

  • The former may be seen as a more rote form of learning, contrasting with the latter which appears to include "executive" aspects2000, Ami Klin with Fred R. Volkmar and Sara S. Sparrow, Asperger syndrome, page 316

More sentences with rote

  • He saffrons his speech with Latin which he knows all by rote.1992, Jerome Mandel, Geoffrey Chaucer: Building the Fragments of the Canterbury Tales. From the entry saffron
  • In Brazil, Lima Barreto and Carlos Sussekind de Mendonça promoted drill and rote training as part of their antisoccer campaign.2023, Matthew Brown, “Controlled Violence”, in Sports in South America: A History, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, →ISBN, page 150. From the entry anti-soccer
  • Even directors with more formal aesthetics—the Kubrickian perfectionist David Fincher and the interpersonal realist Noah Baumbach—did not make rote, familiar-feeling movies.2022, Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties, New York: Penguin Press, →ISBN. From the entry Kubrickian
  • There is a difference between obliterative subsumption that may occur after meaningful learning and forgetting that occurs after rote learning.2022, Joseph D. Novak, Helping People Learn. From the entry obliterative subsumption
  • Blackbirds are spinking, a charmless sound, done by rote.2016, John Lewis-Stempel, “The Turn of the Earth” (chapter VI), in The Running Hare: The Secret Life of Farmland, Doubleday, page 277. From the entry spink
  • Perceived as rote, deskilled work, women trainees were hired exclusively to operate and program the machines that performed payroll, accounting, and even scientific computations.2011, Thomas J. Misa, Gender Codes: Why Women Are Leaving Computing, page 98. From the entry preelectronic
  • Wild thing asana executed without any self-concept modification isn't yoga therapy, and neither is rote memorization of the sutras without enactment of the principles into one's daily behaviors.2018, Matthew J. Taylor, Yoga Therapy as a Creative Response to Pain, page 34. From the entry wild thing
  • In Rabghuzi's Stories of the Prophets, a teacher asked Jesus, who was seven years old at the time, to repeat the alphabet and the abjad by rote.2014, Agnès Nilüfer Kefeli, Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: Conversion, Apostasy, and Literacy, Cornell University Press, unnumbered…. From the entry abjad
  • The danger, as genre-defying or creative nonfiction becomes a genre in its own right—with mix-and-match poised to become a matter of rote—is that no man’s land could become predictably congested.2015 December 6, Geoff Dyer, “‘Based on a true story’: the fine line between fact and fiction”, in The Guardian. From the entry creative nonfiction

Meaning of rote

  1. noun Mechanical routine; a fixed, habitual, repetitive, or mechanical course of procedure.
  2. adjective By repetition or practice and without much thought.
  3. verb To go out by rotation or succession; to rotate.

Full definition of rote

Questions about rote in a sentence

How do you use rote in a sentence?
Rote is used as a noun, adjective and verb. For example: “The pastoral scenes from those commercials don’t bear too much resemblance to the rote of daily life on a farm.”
What is a short sentence with rote?
“Blackbirds are spinking, a charmless sound, done by rote.”
What does rote mean?
Rote means mechanical routine; a fixed, habitual, repetitive, or mechanical course of procedure.

Source and license

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