Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use sordid in a sentence

18 example sentences · adjective

Sordid means distasteful, ignoble, vile, or contemptible. Example: “The politician was involved in a sordid money laundering scheme.”

Examples of sordid by meaning

adjectiveDistasteful, ignoble, vile, or contemptible.

  • The politician was involved in a sordid money laundering scheme.

adjectiveDirty or squalid.

  • They rented a sordid apartment together.

adjectiveMorally degrading.

  • They were a reproach, he felt, to a sordid world.1912, Willa Cather, The Bohemian Girl
  • I know it sounds sordid but you'll be rewarded, when at last I've been given my dues.1994, The Lion King, Be Prepared musical number
  • It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.2006, John C. Roberts, concurrence and dissent in part in League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, 548 U.S. 399 (2006)

adjectiveOf a dull colour.

  • Leaves sordid-tomentulose beneath1926, Paul Carpenter Standley, Trees and Shrubs of Mexico: Bignoniaceae-Asteraceae, page 1530

More sentences with sordid

  • True, we've always had the sordid working their evilfare before the web.2014 January 23, Mark Y. Herring, Are Libraries Obsolete? An Argument for Relevance in the Digital Age, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company…. From the entry evilfare
  • They had summoned “the majority” to their sordid little unification conference in Brussels.1989, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by H. T. Willetts, August 1914, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, →ISBN, pages 173–74. From the entry Jaurès
  • Physical surroundings are often sordid, discipline is uneven or nonexistent, fistfights and gangwars all take their toll.1973, Whitney North Seymour Jr., Why Justice Fails, New York, NY: William Morrow and Company, →ISBN, page 155. From the entry gangwar
  • Yet forward she went, through the whole sordid gamut of pettiness, the long amorphous, gritty street.1920 November 9, D[avid] H[erbert] Lawrence, chapter 1, in Women in Love, New York, N.Y.: Privately printed [by Thomas Seltzer] for…. From the entry amorphous
  • He abandoned the directive will of God for "sordid gain" (cf. 1Tim. 3:8; Titus 1:7, 11; 1Pet. 5:2; Gk. aischrokerdes).2013, Terry Puett, Institute Of Biblical Studies The Book Of Genesis, →ISBN, page 268. From the entry reversionist
  • Any relationship to the sad and sordid Eliot and Silda spectacle of 18 months ago is purely noncoincidental.2009 September 25, Clyde Haberman, “Feasting on the City and Its Foibles”, in New York Times. From the entry noncoincidental
  • But there are those who do not feel that the sordid passages of life should be kept off the stage.1961, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Foreign Affairs, Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act of 1961: Hearings. From the entry passage
  • He was not influenced by sordid considerations. . . .1900, Charles W. Chesnutt, chapter 16, in The House Behind The Cedars. From the entry bar sinister
  • It thus neatly avoided acknowledging the role being played by the women's movement as a force for censorship (and the rather sordid past of A Woman's Place itself).1984 December 22, Gayle Rubin, “Censored: Anti-Porn Laws And Women's Liberation”, in Gay Community News, volume 12, number 23, page 8. From the entry neatly
  • I was perturbed by the suspicion that the anguish of love contemned was alloyed in her broken heart with the pangs, sordid to my young mind, of wounded vanity.1919, W. Somerset Maugham, “11”, in The Moon and Sixpence. From the entry contemn
  • So long as men must live sordidly to win the means of satisfying even their sordid necessities, so long will there exist the vulpinist in man.1907, Robert Kennedy Duncan, The Chemistry of Commerce, page 13. From the entry vulpinist
  • They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.1957 September 5, Jack Kerouac, chapter 9, in On the Road, New York, N.Y.: Viking Press, →OCLC, part 1. From the entry beat generation

Meaning of sordid

  1. adjective Distasteful, ignoble, vile, or contemptible.
  2. adjective Dirty or squalid.
  3. adjective Morally degrading.

Full definition of sordid

Questions about sordid in a sentence

How do you use sordid in a sentence?
Sordid is used as an adjective. For example: “The politician was involved in a sordid money laundering scheme.”
What is a short sentence with sordid?
“Leaves sordid-tomentulose beneath”
What does sordid mean?
Sordid means distasteful, ignoble, vile, or contemptible.

Source and license

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