How to use sustain in a sentence
40 example sentences · verb, noun
Sustain means to maintain, or keep in existence. Example: “The professor had trouble sustaining students’ interest until the end of her lectures.”
Examples of sustain by meaning
verbTo maintain, or keep in existence.
- The professor had trouble sustaining students’ interest until the end of her lectures.
- The city came under sustained attack by enemy forces.
- Sam managed to sustain his erection for two straight hours.
verbTo provide for or nourish.
- provisions to sustain an army
- We rode five farsakhs today, sustained by a single bowl of curds and tortured by the wooden saddles.1937, Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana, London: Macmillan, Part 2, page 59
verbTo experience or suffer (an injury, etc.).
- The building sustained major damage in the earthquake.
verbTo confirm, prove, or corroborate; to uphold.
- to sustain a charge, an accusation, or a proposition
verbTo keep from falling; to bear; to uphold; to support.
- A foundation sustains the superstructure; an animal sustains a load; a rope sustains a weight.
verbTo be a long-lasting sound.
- I like how long that drum sustains.
More sentences with sustain
- Genuine cowards follow wicked people and cannot reliably sustain any virtue.From the entry wicked
- I get the best-sounding sustain and smooth harmonic distortion when I run the amp dimed.From the entry dime
- Genuine cowards follow the wicked and cannot reliably sustain any virtue.From the entry reliably
- Essentially the welfare state destroys the ethic which sustains this very state.2021, Andrei Znamenski, “Regime of Goodness: Social Democracy and the Swedish Model, 1920s–1990s”, in Socialism as a Secular Creed: A…. From the entry no strings attached
- As a result, most “Kidfluencers” parents manage their accounts in order to sustain their online presence.2021 February 23, Vanessa Cezarita Cordeiro, ““Kidfluencers” and Social Media: The Evolution of Child Exploitation in the Digital Age”, in…. From the entry kidfluencer
- I have done my part by paying taxes to sustain payments of anticipated benefits.2018 November 3, Robert Millsap, “Are Baby Boomers Being Selfish?”, in The New York Times, →ISSN. From the entry guilt trip
- To maintain relevance and sustain marketable skills, IT professionals must reskill and reskill and reskill.2015, Richard Eleftherios Boyatzis, Kylie Rochford, Scott N. Taylor, editors, The Impact of Shared Vision on Leadership, Engagement…. From the entry reskill
- In practice, a well joined glue-on and a properly fitted bolt-on will sustain just as well.1988, Michael Ross, “The Electric Guitar as an Acoustic Instrument”, in Getting Great Guitar Sounds: A Non-technical Approach to Shaping…. From the entry bolt-on
- Indeed, the superquintessence sustains the quintessence itself as well as the other four.1910, Hermetic medicine and hermetic philosophy, Pacific Section, American Association of Petroleum Geologist, page 340. From the entry superquintessence
- O’Donnell sounded world-weary as he recollected trying to sustain strategies for big issues through games of ministerial musical chairs.2026 June 22, Tom Clark, “The ungovernable country? Why Britain keeps losing prime ministers”, in The Guardian, →ISSN. From the entry musical chairs
- I stood close to heartsick mourners and worried that I would not sustain the enormousness of their spiritual weight.2024 September 17, Lauren DePino, “I Sang at Hundreds of Funerals. This Is What I Learned About Grief.”, in The New York Times Magazine. From the entry enormousness
- What the ultra-rich want is to sustain and extend the economic system that put them where they are.2023 July 15, George Monbiot, “With our food systems on the verge of collapse, it’s the plutocrats v life on Earth”, in The Guardian, →ISSN. From the entry ultra-rich
- Marine snow contains sufficient energy and nutrients to sustain large numbers of marine organisms in the aphotic zone.2022, Michael Kent, The Marine Environment and Biodiversity, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 24. From the entry marine snow
- They routinely followed up and visited households to encourage them to sustain safe sanitation practices through affirmative, encouraging conversations.2021 July, R. Iyer, J. P. Shukla, A. Verma, “Community Leave No One Behind: Lessons from a Pilot”, in Sanitation Learning Hub Learning…. From the entry Gandhigiri
- Being an author is sometimes straineous on the brain but over time you develop the technicalities to sustain consciousness.2020, Noel Grace, A Visionary Messenger. From the entry straineous
- A few service the particular needs of other species, including vermiaries that sustain Lekgolo colonies transplanted from their home on Te.2017 September 5, Kenneth Peters, Halo: Warfleet – An Illustrated Guide to the Spacecraft of Halo, Bloomsbury, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 68. From the entry vermiary
- Unfortunately, he could only sustain so much abuse.2016, Jacob Russell Dring, Endless the Chase. From the entry ballet
- If you wikipedia "dead", it says that it is the permanent termination of all biological functions that sustain living organisms.2013, Dave Cole, Straight A's, spoken by Charles (Riley Thomas Stewart). From the entry wikipedia
- Despite the portentousness of its title, La France remains a close and intimate work that sustains its singularity to the end.2008 July 8, Fernando F. Croce, “La France”, in Slant Magazine. From the entry portentousness
- That should sustain a landing while we contrive something longer-term.2007, Josepha Sherman, Susan Shwartz, Epiphany, page 5. From the entry superharden
- But here in a land whose resources and infrastructure cannot sustain such frivolity, the barber doesn't even bat an eyelid.2006, Pete Takeda, An Eye at the Top of the World, page 116. From the entry bat an eyelid
- They thought he was a good boy, cultivatable, in the way that land is, to yield harvests that sustain the cultivator.1988, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions, Faber & Faber Limited (2021), page 37. From the entry cultivatable
- This superactivity sustains a superbombardment of the respiratory center.1946, American Journal of Physiology, Volume 145, American Physiological Society, page 12. From the entry superbombardment
- Of the thing that sustains him through trials man has no inkling, much less knowledge, at the time.1927, M[ohandas] K[aramchand] Gandhi, “निर्बल के बल राम [Nirbala ke bala Rama]”, in Mahadev Desai, transl., The Story of My Experiments…. From the entry inkling
- The Civil Surgeon was the first to sustain their attack, as he drove under their trees in his tumtum.1911, Robert Ernest Vernède, An Ignorant in India. From the entry tumtum
- Although the station tearoom couldn't be reached by rail during the closure, which started on October 5, it did help feed and sustain the workforce.2019 November 6, “Network News”, in Rail, page 11. From the entry tearoom
- If I got to college and couldn't sustain my studies and crew, there could be only one choice of which I'd vote off the island.2015, Christopher Koelher, Poz, page 66. From the entry vote off the island
- Only with the explosive population growth made possible by agriculture did human populations reach the high numbers required to sustain our crowd diseases.2013, Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, →ISBN. From the entry crowd disease
- God and Goddess watched as the finite universe continued to develop into a stable platform to sustain finite life and were pleased.2006, Ronald L. Clark, The Grace of Being, page 22. From the entry god
- The other sustains a spear with the cap of liberty and over the whole floats a banner-roll, inscribed - "The spell is broken".2000, Anita Callaway, Visual Ephemera: Theatrical Art in Nineteenth-century Australia, UNSW Press, →ISBN, page 19. From the entry banner roll
- The resources channelled to those institutions which showed themselves most adept at formfilling, self-promotion and presentation were inadequate to sustain the quality they claimed.1997, Eric J Evans, Thatcher and Thatcherism. From the entry channel
Meaning of sustain
- verb To maintain, or keep in existence.
- verb To provide for or nourish.
- verb To encourage or sanction (something).
Questions about sustain in a sentence
- How do you use sustain in a sentence?
- Sustain is used as a verb and noun. For example: “The professor had trouble sustaining students’ interest until the end of her lectures.”
- What is a short sentence with sustain?
- “provisions to sustain an army”
- What does sustain mean?
- Sustain means to maintain, or keep in existence.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: sustain (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 sustain in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/sustain. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
