toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

utilitarian
in a sentence

show 58 more with this conextual meaning
  • It was too tall, she would think, too unshapely, too …. utilitarian.†   (source)
  • Langdon followed him to the top of the stairs, into another corridor, and then through an unmarked door into a utilitarian hallway.†   (source)
  • But this was not only due to her limited time and the danger of being taken by surprise, it was also her nature that caused her letters to avoid emotional pitfalls and confine themselves to relating the events of her daily life in the utilitarian style of a ship's log.†   (source)
  • The last two magnets — round black utilitarian pieces that were my favorites because they could hold ten sheets of paper to the fridge without breaking a sweat — did not want to cooperate with my fixation.†   (source)
  • Phaedrus didn't understand this attitude, didn't know what to do about it, and because he wasn't a student of science for personal or utilitarian reasons, it just stopped him completely.†   (source)
  • But the extraordinary satisfactions of the steamy bathroom seemed to have evaporated as she shut the door, and the washing of her clothes, watching the turbid water flow from them down the drain of the bathtub, was disappointingly utilitarian.†   (source)
  • It borrowed from the nineteenth-century utilitarian philosophers, from the notion that one should provide the greatest good for the greatest number, and it was expressed in a language of realism.†   (source)
  • Once the armor is on, I strap on my weaponry: scims and daggers of Serric steel, razor-sharp and graceful, especially compared to the dull, utilitarian weapons we've used until now.†   (source)
  • We need daylight and to that extent it is utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need.†   (source)
  • But Blanca soon discovered that she was bored making utilitarian objects, and that it was far more amusing to make statues of animals and people.†   (source)
  • In some cases, the front porches were sagging and had been propped up by an assortment of utilitarian items to keep them from giving way completely: concrete blocks or stacked bricks; two-by-fours that protruded from below like short chopsticks.†   (source)
  • These were not the gray, utilitarian wagons I'd gotten used to seeing on Cairnholm, but like something from a circus, painted every color of the rainbow, sporting ornately carved roofs and doors, pulled by long-maned horses, and driven by men and women whose bodies fluttered with beaded necklaces and bright scarves.†   (source)
  • Six pairs of moccasins, me decorative, some very utilitarian, lay side by side under her dresses. e scooped up the first pair.†   (source)
  • For me it's purely justice-not so much utilitarian, but aesthetic.†   (source)
  • It is too big a city for that; its streets are too dirty, its buildings too coarsely utilitarian.†   (source)
  • Western clothes were brought from several shops, clothes that struck Marie as odd; they seemed drab and utilitarian, neat but dreary.†   (source)
  • My costume for traveling was utilitarian if a trifle bizarre.†   (source)
  • He had a utilitarian approach to clothes, as. he did to most other things, and even the spectacles he occasionally wore had steel rims.†   (source)
  • For the first time he realized that eating was something more than a utilitarian function.   (source)
    utilitarian = concerned with usefulness
  • Your majesty has not acquired the utilitarian habit of checking the public accounts.   (source)
    utilitarian = practical
  • His own person was the exact embodiment of his utilitarian character.   (source)
    utilitarian = concerned with usefulness rather than beauty, style, or philosophical purity
  • Like everything at Martha Graham it had utilitarian aims.†   (source)
  • But also briskly utilitarian — run on the North American mill-town factory principle of quick processing, and dedicated to the greatest happiness of the greatest number, no matter how grim and minimal the quality of that happiness may be.†   (source)
  • If Phaedrus had entered science for ambitious or utilitarian purposes it might never have occurred to him to ask questions about the nature of a scientific hypothesis as an entity in itself.†   (source)
  • The interior reminded Langdon of the neo-Gothic buildings of Yale University—breathtaking on the outside, and yet surprisingly utilitarian on the inside, their period elegance having been retrofitted to endure heavy foot traffic.†   (source)
  • Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes.†   (source)
  • Nevertheless, Arcadio was a solitary and frightened child during the insomnia plague, in the midst of Ursula's utilitarian fervor, during the delirium of Jose Arcadio Buendia, the hermetism of Aureliano, and the mortal rivalry between Amaranta and Rebeca.†   (source)
  • It's called Life Drawing, and is held on Tuesdays at the Toronto College of Art, in a large bare room, beyond which is a utilitarian stairway, then McCaul Street, then Queen with its drunks and streetcar tracks, and beyond that square, boxy Toronto.†   (source)
  • The room was gray and lighted with fluorescent lights; the tone was sparsely utilitarian, and Comroe found it unpleasant.†   (source)
  • The central core was perhaps thirty feet wide, painted a utilitarian gray; the core itself, a cylindrical shaft of cables and machinery, lay before him.†   (source)
  • Architecture is primarily a utilitarian conception, and the problem is to elevate the principle of pragmatism into the realm of esthetic abstraction.†   (source)
  • It was bound to life, and so merely utilitarian—unheroic, miserably so.†   (source)
  • Their utilitarian value was not understood, and now it was too late.†   (source)
  • His own person was the exact embodiment of his utilitarian character.†   (source)
  • Under the utilitarian motive of Rosedale's wooing she had felt, clearly enough, the heat of personal inclination.†   (source)
  • The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy deeds.†   (source)
  • For example, prompted by the sight of the star inserted in the Victory's quarter-deck designating the spot where the Great Sailor fell, these martial utilitarians may suggest considerations implying that Nelson's ornate publication of his person in battle was not only unnecessary, but not military, nay, savored of foolhardiness and vanity.†   (source)
  • But do you notice how, three hundred miles beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines, the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilisation wither and die, to be replaced by pure exercises of imagination, that have the futility, often the charm, and sometimes the deep hidden truthfulness, of works of art?†   (source)
  • It has no connection with anything in the world that I've ever been interested in, except a slim, utilitarian connection with economics.†   (source)
  • The jolly tombstone-yard, where a utilitarian sculptor in a red calfskin overcoat whistled as he hammered the shiniest of granite headstones.†   (source)
  • The luxury of lying late in bed was a pleasure belonging to the life of ease; it had no part in the utilitarian existence of the boarding-house.†   (source)
  • What we observe here is nothing less than the difference between what is utilitarian and what is humane.†   (source)
  • Joachim sat there with his eyes cast down, well aware of his utilitarian role in all this, and Mademoiselle Kleefeld for her part took increasing offense as she realized from Hans Castorp's roving, blank glaze that she was only a means to some other end—and all the while Hans Castorp sulked and played coy and turned fancy phrases and made his voice as melodious as possible, until he finally achieved his goal, and Frau Chau-chat turned to look directly at the conversational…†   (source)
  • There had been a germ of truth in his declaration to Gerty Farish that he had never wanted to marry a "nice" girl: the adjective connoting, in his cousin's vocabulary, certain utilitarian qualities which are apt to preclude the luxury of charm.†   (source)
  • As her social talents, backed by Mr. Trenor's bank-account, almost always assured her ultimate triumph in such competitions, success had developed in her an unscrupulous good nature toward the rest of her sex, and in Miss Bart's utilitarian classification of her friends, Mrs. Trenor ranked as the woman who was least likely to "go back" on her.†   (source)
  • They locked up the office, and the young man followed his companion through the private little door which, admitting directly into Henchard's garden, permitted a passage from the utilitarian to the beautiful at one step.†   (source)
  • Utilitarian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, Commissioners of Fact, genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little dog's-eared creeds, the poor you will have always with you.†   (source)
  • It is possible that there was this golden legend under the utilitarian one: "I will help to my last effort the woman I have loved so dearly."†   (source)
  • Well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit Beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit, Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire Warms feet and hands—nor does to more aspire; By whose compact utilitarian heap The present may sit down and go to sleep, Nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked, And with us by the unequal light of the old wood fire talked.†   (source)
  • You remind me of the radical cobblers in the silly old novels, who, according to the authors, were prepared to trample down all good manners in the pursuit of utilitarian knowledge.†   (source)
  • Since then the appellation which I had thought to reserve to the horizons and landscapes of a merely realistic dream-country, has become more and more popular as a practical definition; and the dream-country has, by degrees, solidified into a utilitarian region which people can go to, take a house in, and write to the papers from.†   (source)
  • …to; but I can at least hint at one of the chief difficulties which had to be met: and that was, that when men began to settle down after the war, and their labour had pretty much filled up the gap in wealth caused by the destruction of that war, a kind of disappointment seemed coming over us, and the prophecies of some of the reactionists of past times seemed as if they would come true, and a dull level of utilitarian comfort be the end for a while of our aspirations and success.†   (source)
  • Though Jeremy Bentham's skeleton, which hangs for candelabra in the library of one of his executors, correctly conveys the idea of a burly-browed utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy's other leading personal characteristics; yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from any leviathan's articulated bones.†   (source)
  • With his unbending, utilitarian, matter-of-fact face, he hardened her again; and the moment shot away into the plumbless depths of the past, to mingle with all the lost opportunities that are drowned there.†   (source)
  • As cultural ecologist Paul Shepard has observed, "The nomadic Bedouin does not dote on scenery, paint landscapes, or compile a nonutilitarian natural history…."   (source)
    nonutilitarian = designed for beauty or style rather than usefulness
    standard prefix: The prefix "non-" in nonutilitarian means not and reverses the meaning of utilitarian. This is the same pattern you see in words like nonfat, nonfiction, and nonprofit.
  • They were set in small grassless plots littered with broken things, bricks, planks, crockery, things of a once utilitarian value.   (source)
    utilitarian = concerned with usefulness rather than beauty or style
  • Mrs. Baird's candles were far more utilitarian—plain white plumber's candies—but there were a lot of them, and three folders of matches as well.†   (source)
  • Far from being the delicate ornamental structures I had imagined them to be, the fish pools were little more than utilitarian rock-lined troughs, placed conveniently near to the kitchens.†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)