Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use underbelly in a sentence

16 example sentences · noun

Underbelly means the underside of an animal. Example: “We identified the species of the snake by its blue-grey underbelly.”

Examples of underbelly by meaning

nounThe underside of an animal.

  • We identified the species of the snake by its blue-grey underbelly.
  • The soft underbelly of the dragon.1952 September, Philip K[indred] Dick, “The Gun”, in Planet Stories, New York, N.Y.: Love Romances Publishing Company, →OCLC; republished...
  • The biologist and his team were greeted by a nonstop squid review, with Humboldt squid darting in toward the boat and flashing their underbellies in attempts to lure small schooling fish near the surface.2015, Michael Tennesen, The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man, New York, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, →ISBN; trade...

nounThe underside of any thing.

  • A jolt told me that the Nautilus had bumped the underbelly of the Ice Bank, still quite thick to judge from the hollowness of the accompanying noise.1993, Jules Verne, chapter 37, in Walter James Miller, Frederick Paul Walter, transl., Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea...

nounThe side which is not normally seen, normally a dark, immoral place.

  • The area by the canal is the underbelly of town – not something you’d see in the guidebooks.
  • In order to take the initiative, military leaders from Great Britain and the United States decided to attack in Africa, cross the Mediterranean, and move up against the "soft underbelly" of German-dominated Europe.1967, Boyd C. Shafer, Richard A. McLemore, Everett Auspurger, Kenneth E. Miller, “World Cataclysm and the United States”, in Manual, Test...
  • It is this intra-movement contention that comprises the soft underbelly of violent jihad, which can be exploited to great ends.2006 February 14, “Organizational Vulnerabilities and Recommendations to Exploit Them”, in Harmony and Disharmony: Exploiting al-Qa’ida’s...

More sentences with underbelly

  • The under side of a gummy squirrel, showing its bright red feeding palps (the flower-like structure) and underbelly.2023 May 25, “Meet the ‘gummy squirrel’ and thousands of other newly discovered deep-sea species – in pictures”, in Katharine Viner…. From the entry gummy squirrel
  • He risked a quick glance with his pencil torch and immediately the underbelly of the mass of brown tree-coral came alive.1954, Ian Fleming, “Beau Desert”, in Live and Let Die, London: Pan Books, published 1957, page 202. From the entry tree coral
  • A no-holds-barred, gritty – albeit often comic – portrait of the travails of a disparate group of misfits navigating Edinburgh’s dark, drug-riddled underbelly.2023 July 2, David Barnett, “‘Choose drugs?’ 30 years after he wrote Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh says life is tougher now”, in The…. From the entry no-holds-barred
  • “Those endeavors are about to become more public; and the public is about to get a big window into the unseemly underbelly of Trumpland.”2018 December 1, Brad Reed, “Conservative writer says "underbelly of Trumpland" will be exposed”, in Salon. From the entry Trumpland
  • But supply convoys are the soft underbelly of a powerful, modern military force that the Taliban is incapable of matching in conventional combat.2009 March 30, Mustafa Qadri, “Nato's soft underbelly”, in The Guardian. From the entry soft underbelly
  • Scientists have known for years that the Thwaites glacier is the soft underbelly of the Antarctic ice sheet, and first found that it was unstable decades ago.2014 May 12, Suzanne Goldenberg, “Western Antarctic ice sheet collapse has already begun, scientists warn”, in The Guardian. From the entry antarctic
  • The current, predominantly right-wing perception is of the Balkans as a contagious disease, an infectious sore in the soft underbelly of Europe, best left to fester in isolation.2014, Christian Promitzer, Siegfried Gruber, Harald Heppner, editors, Southeast European Studies in a Globalizing World, LIT Verlag…. From the entry soft underbelly
  • Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of US lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a near-Lewinskian scale?2012, David Foster Wallace, Consider The Lobster: Essays and Arguments, page xxvi. From the entry Lewinskian
  • In Japan, setoka oranges are compared to the fat underbelly of tuna, and called the "otoro of the citrus world," due to the juicy and plump flesh of the fruit.2020 July 31, Jess, “Tokyo’s raindrop jelly-like traditional summer mochi has citrus surprise”, in Japan Today. From the entry setoka

Meaning of underbelly

  1. noun The underside of an animal.
  2. noun The underside of any thing.
  3. noun The side which is not normally seen, normally a dark, immoral place.

Full definition of underbelly

Questions about underbelly in a sentence

How do you use underbelly in a sentence?
Underbelly is used as a noun. For example: “We identified the species of the snake by its blue-grey underbelly.”
What is a short sentence with underbelly?
“The soft underbelly of the dragon.”
What does underbelly mean?
Underbelly means the underside of an animal.

Source and license

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