Sample sentences for PUNITIVE - verbalworkout.com

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Definition

inflicting punishment

No action could be taken when punitive squadrons joined the people they had been sent to punish.
Ayn Rand -- Atlas Shrugged

It's an unrelenting, punitive, miserable existence.
Scott Pratt -- An Innocent Client
Moving was a lesson in punitive anatomy.
Patrick Rothfuss -- The Name of the Wind
Mason's manner was snarling, punitive, sinister, bitterly sarcastic.
Theodore Dreiser -- An American Tragedy
Or I shall have to take some severe punitive measures.
Sharon M. Draper -- Tears of a Tiger
EST isn't always used for punitive measures, as our nurse uses it, and it isn't pure sadism on the staff's part, either.
Ken Kesey -- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The Commander, instead, smells of mothballs, or is this odor some punitive form of aftershave?
Margaret Atwood -- The Handmaid's Tale
Our cultural heritage will be lost to a whole generation, excluded by a punitive financial barrier.
Sophie Kinsella -- Confessoins of a Shopaholic
Death row is the most restrictive punitive confinement permitted.
Bryan Stevenson -- Just Mercy
He means to test us, and something punitive comes next.
Homer -- The Iliad
It was a more effective, and more demoralizing, treatment than any punitive action could have been.
Arthur C. Clarke -- Childhood's End
The ban on phone calls was, then, purely punitive, just as the pepper-spraying of the child-man had been born of a combination of opportunity, cruelty, ambivalence, and sport.
Dave Eggers -- Zeitoun
And as if punitive taxation, the destruction of their property, and all their other sufferings were not enough, they are subjected to pogroms, insults, and accusations that they lack patriotism.
Boris Pasternak -- Doctor Zhivago
And she would make me stand and endure a punitive silence, a comment on myself and my foolishness, overgrown and long-legged in my short pants, large-headed, with black mass of hair and cleft chin—a source of jokes.
Saul Bellow -- The Adventures of Augie March
If the death penalty is ever to be imposed for desertion, it should be imposed in this case, not as a punitive measure nor as retribution, but to maintain that discipline upon which alone an army can succeed against the enemy.
Kurt Vonnegut -- Slaughterhouse-Five
Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and gave it him in payment for his day's work, telling him to go home and never let him see him in one of those fields again.
Thomas Hardy -- Jude the Obscure
Physical modesty in such cramped quarters 1 The fine for killing alligators appears to be a conservation measure and means of controlling turtles, not a punitive action against the Negroes, though few Negroes realize this. was impossible, indeed in such a context it would have been ridiculous.
John Howard Griffin -- Black Like Me
He had been trained in coded field communications to take advantage of his obvious intelligence, and to avoid the likely consequences of his physical immaturity if he were an infantry regular, which would be certain injury and possible death at the punitive hands of superiors, long before an enemy confronted him.
Chang-rae Lee -- A Gesture Life
She got cavity-searched every day for a month once, right after she had spoken up at a meeting and suggested that her supervisor might be on the wrong track with a major programming project It was punitive and vicious, she knew it was, but she always wanted to give something back to her country, and whenever you work for the Feds you just accept the fact that there's going to be some politicking.
Neal Stephenson -- Snow Crash
"I've read about how Jews and non-Aryans were harassed and taxed punitively and had to give up everything to be allowed to leave the country."
Mina Baites -- The Silver Music Box

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punitive