Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use scavenge in a sentence

15 example sentences · verb

Scavenge means to collect and remove refuse, or to search through refuse, carrion, or abandoned items for useful material. Example: “We scavenged a couple of old beer cans for our art project.”

Examples of scavenge by meaning

verbTo collect and remove refuse, or to search through refuse, carrion, or abandoned items for useful material.

  • We scavenged a couple of old beer cans for our art project.
  • They had to scavenge the forest for firewood.

More sentences with scavenge

  • I surprised a raccoon scavenging through the garbage last night.From the entry surprise
  • He built his first hoverchair all by himself out of scavenged parts when he was only eight!2006, Carolyn Hill, Bead's Pickle. From the entry hoverchair
  • Tens of thousands of the unemployed scavenged the streets collecting cardboard, an enduring image that gave rise to the term “cartoneros.”2015 June 25, James B. Stewart, “If Greece Defaults, Imagine Argentina, but Much Worse”, in New York Times. From the entry cartonero
  • At the contact to sediment infillings, fungi produced haustoria that penetrated and scavenged on the remains of fragmented marine organisms.2015 July 17, “Zygomycetes in Vesicular Basanites from Vesteris Seamount, Greenland Basin – A New Type of Cryptoendolithic Fungi”, in PLOS…. From the entry infillings
  • Poppies, hemp, and darnel were scavenged, dried, and ground up to produce a medieval hash brownie known as "crazy bread".1999, Robert Lacey, Danny Danziger, The Year 1000: What life was like at the turn of The First Millennium, London: Abacus, published 2000…. From the entry darnel
  • But this beetle (left) was observed to visit with impunity and even appeared to be scavenging insect bodies from the pitcher.1989 May, Uwe George, “Venezuela's Islands in Time”, in National Geographic, volume 175, number 5, page 551. From the entry pitcher
  • Accordingly much trace elements in hydrothermal solutions will pass unaffected by scavenging of biogenic FeOOH in the inner exhalative zone.1987, Rafael Rodríguez-Clemente, Yves Tardy, Geochemistry and Mineral Formation in the Earth Surface, page 316. From the entry exhalative
  • Spying flames vomiting from a Manhattan tenement one night last week, a scavenging junkman named Roderick Good turned in an alarm.1934 April 2, “Business: Tenements”, in Time, archived from the original on 05 Mar 2012. From the entry rookery
  • But he'll scavenge off her leavings.2012, C. Stephen Jaeger, Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West. From the entry overswollen
  • The Swoose was so named because it contained so many scavenged parts that it was half swan and half goose or a “Swoose”.2005, Robert R. Burch, World War II: A Pilot's Experience, Trafford Publishing, page 69. From the entry swoose
  • At a stroke the bhangis will raise scavenging to a fine art and give it the status it should have had long ago.1946 June 23, Mohandas Gandhi, in Harijan, reprinted in Economic Thought, published 1962. From the entry bhangi
  • The unifying thread is a kind of magpie postminimalism, which invigorates familiar abstract strategies — grids, serial repetition, reductive forms — using materials scavenged from everyday life.2007 January 5, The New York Times, “Art in Review”, in New York Times. From the entry postminimalism
  • The scavenge pump is designed to remove the last amounts of usable fuel from the CWT and pump it into the left inboard (No. 2) fuel tank.2000 August 23, National Transportation Safety Board, “1.6.2.2 747-100 Fuel Pump System Description”, in Aircraft Accident Report…. From the entry scavenge pump

Meaning of scavenge

  1. verb To collect and remove refuse, or to search through refuse, carrion, or abandoned items for useful material.
  2. verb To remove unwanted material from something, especially to purify molten metal by removing impurities.
  3. verb To expel the exhaust gases from the cylinder of an internal combustion engine, and draw in air for the next cycle.

Full definition of scavenge

Questions about scavenge in a sentence

How do you use scavenge in a sentence?
Scavenge is used as a verb. For example: “We scavenged a couple of old beer cans for our art project.”
What is a short sentence with scavenge?
“But he'll scavenge off her leavings.”
What does scavenge mean?
Scavenge means to collect and remove refuse, or to search through refuse, carrion, or abandoned items for useful material.

Source and license

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