Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use sentient in a sentence

25 example sentences · adjective, noun

Sentient means experiencing sensation, thought, or feeling. Example: “Consider fish, who are apparently sentient yet cognitively extremely primitive in comparison with humans.”

Examples of sentient by meaning

adjectiveExperiencing sensation, thought, or feeling.

  • Consider fish, who are apparently sentient yet cognitively extremely primitive in comparison with humans.
  • Obviously, other morally relevant considerations would apply to the case of a sentient fetus, as by acquiring sentience it acquires interests and moral status.

adjectivePossessing human-like awareness and intelligence.

  • While I had heard such talk before, I had always felt that sentient robots were in the realm of science fiction.2000 April, Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn't Need Us”, in Wired
  • I don't want to blow up something that could evolve into a sentient species in a couple of billion years.2002, André Bormanis, “Silent Enemy”, in Star Trek: Enterprise, season 1, episode 12, spoken by Jonathan Archer
  • Goertzel knew he had finally reached the end goal: Desdemona, a machine he had built, was sentient.2022 August 5, Cade Metz, “A.I. Is Not Sentient. Why Do People Say It Is?”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

nounAn intelligent, self-aware being.

  • The merpeople and the sentients who lived on the beach often hitched rides on these creatures, steering them by pressure on exposed nerve centers.1965, Philip José Farmer, The Maker of Universes

More sentences with sentient

  • Nearly all computer scientists agree that AI chatbots are pseudosentient rather than sentient.From the entry pseudosentient
  • Implementing quantum bogosort increased my script's performance by 50%, but I still feel a little bit guilty about my computer killing quadrillions of sentient beings a second.From the entry quantum bogosort
  • But is there a persuasive case that the ethics of merely sentient beings should make this distinction?2025, Matthew D. Adler, Risk, Death, and Well-Being: The Ethical Foundations of Fatality Risk Regulation (Population-Level Bioethics…. From the entry interbeing
  • It is individuals, not groups, who are sentient—who feel pleasure and pain, fulfillment and anguish.2018, Steven Pinker, “Chapter 1: Dare to Understand!”, in Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress…. From the entry humanism
  • Antinatalism is a negative view toward human fertility (and perhaps the fertility of other sentient life forms).2015, Todd K. Shackelford, Ranald D. Hansen, The Evolution of Morality, Springer, →ISBN, page 141. From the entry antinatalism
  • The other was truly alien, a sentient cloudform, an intelligent grouping of tangible electrons.2010, Paul Williams, The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon - Volume 3, page 104. From the entry cloudform
  • Likewise, since sentient beings possess a buddha nature, the pursuit of buddahood is meaningful.2004, Padmasambhava, Light of Wisdom, Volume I, →ISBN, page 74. From the entry buddahood
  • I drew that conclusion largely from the fumbling nonintelligence (relatively speaking) of men and all sentient creatures.1997, Theodore Dreiser, Franklin Booth, A Hoosier holiday. From the entry nonintelligence
  • This is done having first attained even-mindedness towards all sentient beings.1976, Bstan-paʼi-ñi-ma (Panchen Lama IV), Jeffrey Hopkins, Practice and theory of Tibetan Buddhism. From the entry even-mindedness
  • Imagine beings that persist over time but are merely sentient.2025, Matthew D. Adler, Risk, Death, and Well-Being: The Ethical Foundations of Fatality Risk Regulation (Population-Level Bioethics…. From the entry interbeing
  • The question at once arises whether medieval thinkers really believed that what we now call inanimate objects were sentient and purposive.1964, C. S. Lewis, chapter 5, in The Discarded Image, Cambridge University Press, page 93. From the entry purposive
  • According to recordings and findings from Khi Tasira, they were interested in not only wide-scale terraforming but the creation of sentient life.2017, BioWare, Mass Effect: Andromeda (Science Fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →OCLC, PC, scene: Remnant: Creators Codex entry. From the entry wide-scale
  • Some transhumanist scholars hold a negative utilitarian ethic, advocating that the strongest ethical mandate is the abolition of suffering among sentient beings.2014, Ronald M[ichael] Green, Nathan J. Palpant, “Suffering and Bioethics: An Introduction to the Volume”, in Suffering and Bioethics…. From the entry negative utilitarian
  • To sum up, the universe is the thoughtform of the collective mindstream of all sentient beings (and there is nothing which is non-sentient; pansentience).2011, Madhusudan Sakya, Current Perspectives in Buddhism, page 158. From the entry pansentience
  • But many of the companies developing AI are going further, hoping to create a sentient machine, a truly new form of co-intelligence that would coexist with us on Earth.2024, Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence, Ebury Publishing, →ISBN. From the entry co-intelligence
  • Twitter's pile of poo also has eyes but looks kind of surprised, perhaps because it’s only just realized that it’s a sentient pile of poo with eyes.2014 November 18, Adam Sternbergh, “Smile, You're Speaking Emoji: The Rapid Evolution of a Wordless Tongue”, in New York Magazine. From the entry pile of poo
  • In other words, simply because we're sentient—let's set the bar low to ensure that even snails and the snailiest humans are also responsible—we're obliged to address global warming.2012, Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought, page 99. From the entry snaily
  • Storm Over Warlock and its sequel, Ordeal in Otherwhere, feature two important themes in Norton's fiction: sentient, benevolent, and telepathetic animals and the profound value of empathy and cooperation.1981, Roger Schlobin, “Book Reviews: Andre Norton Reprinted”, in Science Fiction Studies, volume 8, number 2, page 220. From the entry telepathetic
  • As collaborators (known as “tropers”) at TVtropes.org have written, “It’s not entirely clear how sentient she is, but the Scoobies seem a little unnervingly cavalier about how they treat her.”[2023, Madeline Muntersbjorn, “Dismembering (the) Buffybot”, in Alyson R. Buckman, Juliette C. Kitchens, Katherine A. Troyer, editors…. From the entry troper

Meaning of sentient

  1. adjective Experiencing sensation, thought, or feeling.
  2. adjective Able to consciously perceive through the use of sense faculties.
  3. adjective Possessing human-like awareness and intelligence.

Full definition of sentient

Questions about sentient in a sentence

How do you use sentient in a sentence?
Sentient is used as an adjective and noun. For example: “Consider fish, who are apparently sentient yet cognitively extremely primitive in comparison with humans.”
What is a short sentence with sentient?
“Imagine beings that persist over time but are merely sentient.”
What does sentient mean?
Sentient means experiencing sensation, thought, or feeling.

Source and license

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