Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use underpin in a sentence

18 example sentences · verb

Underpin means to support from below with props or masonry. Example: “You should underpin the mine roof to prevent further collapse.”

Examples of underpin by meaning

verbTo support from below with props or masonry.

  • You should underpin the mine roof to prevent further collapse.

verbTo give support to; to form a basis of; to corroborate.

  • Public confidence in politicians must underpin our democracy.
  • The operator said the results were underpinned by a 16% increase in Q3 sales from North America.2019 November 6, “Eurostar reports another increase in passengers”, in Rail, page 25

More sentences with underpin

  • The relationship between these two parts of me is underpinned by homophobic and acephobic assumptions.2017 February 3, “Plus”, in Varsity, page 18. From the entry acephobic
  • It answers this question by unpacking the epistemic regimes that underpin the move to resilience.2014, Claudia Aradau, “The promise of security: resilience, surprise and epistemic politics”, in Resilience, volume 2, number 2, →DOI…. From the entry epistemic regime
  • It underpins the instruction to ‘check your privilege’.2017, Clare Chambers, “Ideology and Normativity”, in Aristotelian Society, →DOI. From the entry check your privilege
  • What underpins this is a complex, heterogonous, and to Freud, timeless, field of unconscious traces, drives, instincts, processes or, relatedly, Id.2016, Paul Cammell, Reinterpreting the Borderline, page 98. From the entry heterogonous
  • There has to be intention on the part of the person divorcing, because the principle of intention underpins the justice of our legal system.2024 April 15, Emine Sinmaz, quoting Ayesha Vardag, “Wrong couple get divorced after solicitor ‘clicks wrong button’”, in The Guardian…. From the entry clerical error
  • Their precise role in the interplay between itinerance and localisation, long known to underpin Mottness in d-band oxides, has however received much less attention.2015, Mukul S. Laad, S. Koley, A. Taraphder, “Mott transitions and Novel Orders in Multi-Orbital Models: The Relevance of Structural…. From the entry itinerance
  • It peppers the conversation of every BuzzFeeder I speak to; it underpins the company’s entire business model and provides its raison d’être.2013 November 29, Alex Clark, “Know about BuzzFeed”, in Evening Standard Magazine, pages 23–24. From the entry BuzzFeeder
  • The unlearned capacities that underpin language acquisition constitute a uniquely human complex of non-linguistic dispositions and mechanisms that also subserve other cognitive functions.2011 September 21, Barbara C. Scholz, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Geoffrey K. Pullum, Ryan Nefdt, “Philosophy of Linguistics”, in Edward N.…. From the entry subserve
  • Arguments about the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor . . . underpinned the popular fear and loathing of the workhouse that endure in folk memory.2011 October 18, Peter Beresford, “Harassing people on benefits degrades us all”, in The Guardian, UK, retrieved 08 Jun 2014. From the entry folk memory
  • It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism,” Biden said at the donor event.2022 August 26, Rebecca Shabad, quoting Joe Biden, “Biden blasts MAGA philosophy as ‘semi-fascism’”, in NBC News. From the entry semi-fascism
  • Each of these pieces deals with the microformal elements of the text in ways that underpin my larger, structural argument about the imaginative effect of the text.2015, Evelyn Reynolds, “Beowulf's Poetics of Absorption: Narrative Syntax and the Illusion of Stability in the Fight with Grendel's…. From the entry microformal
  • So even if drafters' concrete intentions or meta-intentions are closer to the notion of state consent, the originalist is wrong to assume that this notion underpins human rights treaties.2010, Treaty interpretation and the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties: 30 years on, page 271. From the entry originalist
  • This gigatrend is based in part on the notion of a society underpinned by a series of dichotomies between values and empirical facts, and between goals and means, etc.2010 November 30, Jan-Eric Furubo with Ove Karlsson Vestman, “Evaluation: For Public Good or Professional Power?”, in Pearl Eliadis…. From the entry gigatrend
  • The yield on the 10-year Treasury, which underpins corporate and consumer borrowing and is arguably the most important interest rate in the world, rose roughly 0.1 percentage points on Friday.2025 April 11, Joe Rennison, Colby Smith, “‘This is Not Normal’: Trump’s Tariffs Upend the Bond Market”, in The New York Times, →ISSN. From the entry treasury
  • But other kinds of talk and text that are not visible, so called covert racist discourse, may be just as important in reproducing the culturally shared ideas that underpin racism.2011, Jane H. Hill, The Everyday Language of White Racism, →ISBN, page 1987. From the entry racism

Meaning of underpin

  1. verb To support from below with props or masonry.
  2. verb To give support to; to form a basis of; to corroborate.

Full definition of underpin

Questions about underpin in a sentence

How do you use underpin in a sentence?
Underpin is used as a verb. For example: “You should underpin the mine roof to prevent further collapse.”
What is a short sentence with underpin?
“It underpins the instruction to ‘check your privilege’.”
What does underpin mean?
Underpin means to support from below with props or masonry.

Source and license

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