Sample Sentences for
founder
grouped by contextual meaning
(editor-reviewed)

founder as in:  a founder of the company

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She was a founder of the university.
founder = someone who established or started something
Show 3 more with this contextual meaning
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    The story goes that Slytherin had built a hidden chamber in the castle, of which the other founders knew nothing.  (source)
    founders = people who created (the school)
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    You were part of the bridge between our founders and the current staff.†  (source)
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    The students shuffled off the gray school buses in their state-issued denim for community service—real community service, not the special services of Turner and Elwood's assignments—cleaning up rubbish in the park after July Fourth fireworks or the Founders Day parade.†  (source)
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    As always, he wondered why America's founders had willingly placed their capital in the middle of a malarial swamp.†  (source)
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    I'm absolutely convinced that the reason America went so far and so fast is that our founders were God-fearing men.†  (source)
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    On the walls, where one might have expected to find portraits of the firm's founders, there were portraits of Uga I, Uga II, and Uga III.†  (source)
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    In it, the three men, the founders of the company, were arranged in a pyramid, each of them dressed in their best-known clothes, wearing expressions that spoke, cartoonishly, of their personalities.†  (source)
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    I didn't realize how much Cara had already cleaved to the idea of being an Allegiant, loyal to the faction system, loyal to our founders.†  (source)
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    A central philosophical direction in the twentieth century is therefore ecophilosophy or ecosophy, as one of its founders the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess has called if.†  (source)
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    Three of the scheduled anointed speakers did not show, among them church founders Rev. Thomas McNair, my godfather, and Sister Virginia Ingram, both having pleaded illness or scheduling conflicts.†  (source)
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    She muscled her car through traffic while regaling them with stories about the crazy families of Atlanta—the old plantation owners, the founders of Coca-Cola, the sports stars, and the CNN news people.†  (source)
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    Kennedy meets these islanders in person the next morning, when his canoe founders on the way back to Naru.†  (source)
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    The resistance founders warned us this time would come, told us where to go to survive, galvanized us while the rest of the world was falling apart.†  (source)
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founder as in:  peace talks foundered

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    The strategy foundered with the accident and associated publicity.
    foundered = failed
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    The air here was dark too, and the creepers dropped their ropes like the rigging of foundered ships.  (source)
    foundered = sunken
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    The money ran out, another investment foundered, the loan came due, and Louie had to turn over his keys.  (source)
    foundered = failed
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    ...reading the names of vessels that had long ago foundered at sea or rotted at the wharves,  (source)
    foundered = failed; or sank
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    Women hold their beaded evening bags over their heads, trying to protect their foundering hairdos.†  (source)
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    As I hope For quiet days, fair issue, and long life, With such love as 'tis now, the murkiest den, The most opportune place, the strong'st suggestion Our worser genius can, shall never melt Mine honour into lust, to take away The edge of that day's celebration, When I shall think, or Phoebus' steeds are founder'd, Or Night kept chain'd below.†  (source)
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    This fisherman was one of several in a boat—a craft for traveling on water—that foundered ....sank beneath the water.†  (source)
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    Her fingers bit into the flesh of my wrist; I twisted, stepping back from her, foundering in the face of the hatred, the rage rising like some dormant beast in her, looking out through her eyes.†  (source)
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    Thought As I sit with others at a great feast, suddenly while the music is playing, To my mind, (whence it comes I know not,) spectral in mist of a wreck at sea, Of certain ships, how they sail from port with flying streamers and wafted kisses, and that is the last of them, Of the solemn and murky mystery about the fate of the President, Of the flower of the marine science of fifty generations founder'd off the Northeast coast and going down—of the steamship Arctic going down, Of the veil'd tableau-women gather'd together on deck, pale, heroic, waiting the moment that draws so close—O the moment!†  (source)
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    Hamstrung, the old old man foundered to his knees, as did his suppliant images, his congregation of terrified selves one week, one month, two years, twenty, fifty, seventy, ninety years from now!†  (source)
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    They came out in large numbers in the aftermath of a shipwreck to stand on the beach and stare in awe at the latest foundering vessel; some brought binoculars and cameras.†  (source)
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    From the size of the jar you can tell how old it was when it foundered, inside her, flowed to its death.†  (source)
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    Nothing in Tom-Carl's face indicated that he might have a rude surprise coming to him: already, prosperity-bred independence had undermined his kingdom until it was foundering; two more elections and it would crumble into thesis material for a sociology major.†  (source)
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meaning too rare to warrant focus

Show 1 with this contextual meaning
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The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.  (source)
founder = fail; or sink
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