toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

sentient
in a sentence

show 16 more with this conextual meaning
  • Not a thing seemed to be stirring, but all to be grim and fixed as death or fate, so that a thin streak of white mist, that crept with almost imperceptible slowness across the grass towards the house, seemed to have a sentience and a vitality of its own.†   (source)
  • Its evidence—the evidence of the sentience—was to be seen, he said, (and I here started as he spoke,) in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls.†   (source)
  • The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones—in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around—above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn.†   (source)
  • Our "semisentient" erg in the box there.†   (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "semi-" in semisentient means half or partially. This is the same pattern you see in words like semicircle, semisweet, and semiautomatic.
  • It hung over the suspended waves of the hills, an insentient pivot without which the world would not exist.†   (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "in-" in insentient means not and reverses the meaning of sentient. This is the same pattern you see in words like invisible, incomplete, and insecure.
  • The treeship Yggdrasill with its crew and complement of clones and semisentient erg drivers was dead.†   (source)
  • Transparent mountain ranges of data, endless glaciers of ROMworks, access ganglia spreading like fissures, iron clouds of semisentient internal pro:ess bubbles, glowing pyramids of primary source stuff, each guarded by lakes of black ice and armies of black-pulse pilages.†   (source)
  • Male and female Glatun were nonsentient parasites that existed within a brood pouch on the Glatun sentient neuters.†   (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "non-" in nonsentient means not and reverses the meaning of sentient. This is the same pattern you see in words like nonfat, nonfiction, and nonprofit.
  • …the steps of the years behind them, the steps down a course chosen in the courage of a single loyalty: their love of existence-chosen in the knowledge that nothing will be given, that one must make one's own desire and every shape of its fulfillment-through the steps of shaping metal, rails and motors-they had moved by the power of the thought that one remakes the earth for one's enjoyment, that man's spirit gives meaning to insentient matter by molding it to serve one's chosen goal.†   (source)
  • 'Yes, Rose she said, like that again, and I stopped in running's midstride again though my body, blind unsentient barrow of deluded clay and breath, still advanced And bow I saw that what she held in that lax and negligent hand was the photograph, the picture of herself in its metal case which she had given him, held casual and forgotten against her flank as any interrupted pastime book.†   (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "un-" in unsentient means not and reverses the meaning of sentient. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
  • It broke down, it vanished into that old impotent logic and morality which had betrayed him before and what day might it have been, what furrow might he have stopped dead in, one foot advanced, the unsentient plow handles in his instantaneous unsentient hands, what fence panel held in midair as though it had no weight by muscles which could not feel it, when he realised that there was more in his problem than just lack of time, that the problem contained some super-distillation of this…†   (source)
  • Not even that Neither Judith nor I wanted that Perhaps it was because we did not believe it could be done, but I think it was more than that that we now existed in an apathy which was almost peace, like that of the blind unsentient earth itself which dreams after no flower's stalk nor bud, envies not the airy musical solitude of the springing leaves it nourishes.†   (source)
  • The cause of a brief sharp unforeseen heard loud lone crack emitted by the insentient material of a strainveined timber table.†   (source)
  • Now it bound him with insentient fetters, walling his soul in darkness and silence, blocking it from the world which to him had been a riot of action.†   (source)
  • Around him darkness, fog, solitude, the stormy and nonsentient tumult, the undefined curling of those wild waters.†   (source)
  • Most of us have more or less frequently derived a similar impression from a man's manner of doing some very little thing: plucking a flower, clearing away an obstacle, or even destroying an insentient object.†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)
show 10 more examples with any meaning
  • It was the first sentient being I had ever killed.†   (source)
  • We'll want a sentient being there to monitor things and, as I understand it, he used to work there.†   (source)
  • A single sentient thought began pounding at Vittoria with unrelenting force.†   (source)
  • As they turned a corner the flames chased them as though they were alive, sentient, intent upon killing them.†   (source)
  • He was desperately worried that one day sentient life forms would forget how to do this.†   (source)
  • Not murdering living, sentient beings with an independent genetic future.†   (source)
  • Weren't we, as sentient beings, put upon the earth to be happy, in the brief time allotted to us?†   (source)
  • If they got out of here, the Overlook might subside to its old semi-sentient state, able to do no more than present penny-dreadful horror slides to the more psychically aware guests who entered it.†   (source)
  • Think about it: you can communicate with any sentient being, though the contact may not be very clear.†   (source)
  • The Consul was suddenly very aware that he was, at that second, the only sentient being on an unnamed world.†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)
show 62 more examples with any meaning
  • Something about its curiosity gave it a sentient presence, full of doubt and wanting.†   (source)
  • The Labyrinth is a malevolent sentient creation!†   (source)
  • Immensely powerful, one of her many skills enabled her to Awaken the magical powers that existed in every sentient creature.†   (source)
  • "Bella, I just" — he hesitated and then forced the words out — "I just beheaded and dismembered a sentient creature not twenty yards from you.†   (source)
  • Every sentient being straining and pushing at the shell of identity and distinctness.†   (source)
  • But the Boss only wanted his company and his loyalty down to the last sentient instant of his dying breath.†   (source)
  • The Presger didn't care if a species was sentient or not, conscious or not, intelligent or not.†   (source)
  • The gae bolga was a sentient thing, the living relic of a dark and terrible goddess.†   (source)
  • It's Probably Weird To think about an addiction like it's a sentient being, but that's how it feels.†   (source)
  • I am to be a clean writer, of the most reasonable eye, and present the subject in question like some sentient machine of transcription.†   (source)
  • "Enough," warned a sensation within him, the silent voice he had come to suspect was the sentient will of the shard.†   (source)
  • There was no sensation but he was either trapped in a room with an apparently sentient cab or he was in a very smooth piece of transportation technology.†   (source)
  • Later Yen taught us, 'After life, the rational soul ascends the dragon; the sentient soul descends the dragon.†   (source)
  • The plate darted across the table like a sentient thing, moving so swiftly that George sometimes found it hard to keep his fingers in contact.†   (source)
  • Actually, they were concerned as to whether the thing was truly sentient.†   (source)
  • The farm around the milkhouse lay as quiet as a picture in a magazine, but because of the music it seemed nevertheless alive and sentient, like motionless stone imperceptibly trembling with a dance of atoms, or like a sleeping head full of dreams.†   (source)
  • Oh, they're sentient, all right, Father," said the Consul.†   (source)
  • The dryads, the other nature spirits, the sentient monsters ….†   (source)
  • A thousand sentient beings, closing their eyes forever rather than accept us.†   (source)
  • Also greed and jealousy and every other obsessive urge the sentient races are susceptible to.†   (source)
  • They have been known to occur throughout the sentient races, but especially among magic users.†   (source)
  • Even the most barren soil teemed with organisms; the land itself was alive and sentient.†   (source)
  • Do you realize that if the firing is truly sentient this will be something very like murder?†   (source)
  • All sentient life is sacred.†   (source)
  • The shark, which had seemed only passingly menacing before, now appeared vicious and wholly sentient, the embodiment of the predatory instinct.†   (source)
  • Beeblebrox, the man who invented the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, ex-confidence trickster, once described by Eccentrica Gallumbits as the Best Bang since the Big One, and recently voted the Worst Dressed Sentient Being in the Known Universe for the seventh time … has he got an answer this time?†   (source)
  • The Church has accepted the Hegemony's ruling that… these creatures… ergs… are not sentient beings… and thus not candidates for salvation.†   (source)
  • Remembering the advice he had gotten from the werecat Solembum during his journeys with Brom, Eragon went to the sentient Menoa tree in Du Weldenvarden.†   (source)
  • That series of coincidences, utterly random but mimicking a kind of sentient fate, had been what seemed to make the dog so horribly purposeful, so … so out to get her personally.†   (source)
  • While one was green and unremarkable, the other was entirely white and possessed a ghostly, sentient quality that seemed to latch on and study its subjects with chilling intensity.†   (source)
  • Compared with the awareness it had displayed during the Blood-oath Celebration, the tree almost seemed to be asleep; the only sentient thought Eragon could detect was so long and slow-moving, it was impossible to decipher.†   (source)
  • His bedfellow was the crystal shard, Crenshinibon, an ancient, sentient relic that had waited throughout ages uncounted for one such as he to appear in the bowl.†   (source)
  • Male and female Glatun were nonsentient parasites that existed within a brood pouch on the Glatun sentient neuters.†   (source)
  • You can keep cutting us out in pieces, but you'll just murder more and more sentient creatures of both species.†   (source)
  • With unexpected suddenness, he encountered an immense entity, a sentient being of such a colossal nature, he could not grasp the limits of its psyche.†   (source)
  • …the realm of artifacts, matching them against Godel on mechanical undecidability, playing epistemological games with the Hangman as a counter, wondering, speculating, even hoping, hoping that truth lay with the nobler part: (hat the Hangman, sentient, had made it back, sane, that the Burns killing had actually been something of the sort that now seemed to be the case, that the washed-out experiment had really been a success of a different sort, a triumph, a new link or fob for the…†   (source)
  • And they had to because Harry wished, as every sentient being does, to be loved as a whole and therefore it was just with those whose love he most valued that he could least of all conceal and belie the wolf.†   (source)
  • ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL and beloved of the Bodhisattvas of the Mahayana Buddhism of Tibet, China, and Japan is the Lotus Bearer, Avalokitegvara, "The Lord Looking Down in Pity," so called because he regards with compassion all sentient creatures suffering the evils of existence.†   (source)
  • …exhumed along with the letters from that forgotten chest, carefully, the paper old and faded and falling to pieces, the writing faded, almost indecipherable, yet meaningful, familiar in shape and sense, the name and presence of volatile and sentient forces; you bring them together in the proportions called for, but nothing happens; you re-read, tedious and intent, poring, making sure that you have forgotten nothing, made no miscalculation; you bring them together again and again…†   (source)
  • He did not know the man's name and in the three years since he had been a sentient creature they had not spoken a hundred words.†   (source)
  • In the Heavenly Radiance of the Voidness, There existeth not shadow of thing or concept, Yet it pervaded, all objects of knowledge; Obeisance to the InanutablePeace is at the heart of all because Avalokitegvara—Kwan Yin, the mighty Bodhisattva, Boundless Love, includes, regards, and dwells within (without exception) every sentient being.†   (source)
  • The boy's body might have been wood or stone; a post or a tower upon which the sentient part of him mused like a hermit, contemplative and remote with ecstasy and selfcrucifixion.†   (source)
  • I remember bow as we stood there joined by that volitionless (yes: it too sentient victim just as she and I were) hand, I cried—perhaps not aloud, not with words (and not to Judith, mind: perhaps I knew already, on the instant I entered the house and saw that face which was at once both more and less than Sutpen, perhaps I knew even then what I could not, would not, must not believe)—I cried And you too?†   (source)
  • …sit but rather seemed to project himself ahead like a mirage, in some fierce dynamic rigidity of impatience which the gaunt horse, the saddle, the boots, the leaf-colored and threadbare coat with its tarnished and flappingbraid containing the sentient though nerveless shell, could not keep up with, which seemed to precede him as he dismounted and out of which he said 'Well, daughter' and stooped and touched his beard to Judith's forehead, who had not, did not, move, who stood rigid and…†   (source)
  • And, oh, she had such pretty arms—such a trim, lithe, sentient, quick figure and movements.†   (source)
  • The condition of several moved him as he would have been moved by maimed sentient beings.†   (source)
  • This orchard is sentient, like others, in the month of May.†   (source)
  • "I don't think that if one's a sentient being one can make the distinction.†   (source)
  • Thus, from the very first day, all her sentient and thinking powers loved this kind man.†   (source)
  • Our common fate …. for where is the man—I mean a real sentient man—who does not remember vaguely having been deserted in the fullness of possession by some one or something more precious than life?†   (source)
  • He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence.†   (source)
  • The sun, on account of the mist, had a curious sentient, personal look, demanding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression.†   (source)
  • She longed to be to him something more than a piece of sentient prettiness, a passing diversion to his eye and brain; and the longing betrayed itself in her reply.†   (source)
  • But the terrible silence and emptiness seemed to symbolize her future—she felt as though the house, the street, the world were all empty, and she alone left sentient in a lifeless universe.†   (source)
  • Human shapes, interferences, troubles, and joys were all as if they were not, and there seemed to be on the shaded hemisphere of the globe no sentient being save himself; he could fancy them all gone round to the sunny side.†   (source)
  • CHAPTER 4 I FALL INTO DISGRACE If the room to which my bed was removed were a sentient thing that could give evidence, I might appeal to it at this day — who sleeps there now, I wonder!†   (source)
  • Like sentient things—even like the lords and ladies of creation sometimes—might have done much, but did nothing.†   (source)
  • When I was as old as you, I was a feeling fellow enough, partial to the unfledged, unfostered, and unlucky; but Fortune has knocked me about since: she has even kneaded me with her knuckles, and now I flatter myself I am hard and tough as an India-rubber ball; pervious, though, through a chink or two still, and with one sentient point in the middle of the lump.†   (source)
  • Mrs. Bread looked up the staircase and then down and then she looked at the undusted nymph, as if she possibly had sentient ears.†   (source)
  • But in that case what's more pitiable than a sentient, self-conscious abuse planted by other hands, deeply rooted but aching with a sense of its injustice?†   (source)
  • What an ominous minute is that in which society draws back and consummates the irreparable abandonment of a sentient being!†   (source)
  • She was glowing from her morning toilet as only healthful youth can glow: there was gem-like brightness on her coiled hair and in her hazel eyes; there was warm red life in her lips; her throat had a breathing whiteness above the differing white of the fur which itself seemed to wind about her neck and cling down her blue-gray pelisse with a tenderness gathered from her own, a sentient commingled innocence which kept its loveliness against the crystalline purity of the outdoor snow.†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)
show 3 examples with meaning too rare to warrant focus
  • So he's a person because he's sentient?   (source)
    sentient = able to perceive and feel
  • I just mean, like, a baby isn't sentient, but a baby is still a person.   (source)
  • He had a body and a soul and feelings, and he spoke a language, and he was an adult, and if he and Rey were in hot, hairy, communicative love, then let's just thank God that two consenting, sentient adults found each other in a dark and broken galaxy.   (source)
▲ show less (of above)