toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

generic
in a sentence

show 118 more with this conextual meaning
  • "It was sort of a generic word to describe someone who was slow," I said.†   (source)
  • She wasn't really his aunt, of course —just one of the old women in the community, a generic tia who helped watch the kids.†   (source)
  • The walls glowed with a warm, dull haze of opulence, a generic mellowness of antiquity; but then it all broke apart into clarity and color and pure Northern light, portraits, interiors, still lifes, some tiny, others majestic: ladies with husbands, ladies with lapdogs, lonely beauties in embroidered gowns and splendid, solitary merchants in jewels and furs.†   (source)
  • Instead I drove the streets of Lenoir, passing through the retail district, complete with the assorted collection of fast-food restaurants, and began to slow the car only when I reached the less generic part of town.†   (source)
  • It was a man's tenor voice, a very pleasant, generic voice — the kind of voice that you heard in the background of luxury car commercials.†   (source)
  • The lady was young, black, intelligent, childless, private school—educated, and with a manner and an accent that made her impossible to place as anything other than generically American.†   (source)
  • Neither the sister nor our young hero has a name, so his situation is made slightly generic, which is useful.†   (source)
  • Maybe a generic ….†   (source)
  • Stuck onto the same signpost, beneath the Buy 'n' Fly sign, is a smaller one, a narrow strip in generic lettering: THE CLINK.†   (source)
  • The only generic hospital garb sitting around are those embarrassing gowns that they put the patients in.†   (source)
  • Such details escape him now, and his descriptions sound to him generic, insipid, like those of an ordinary AP story.†   (source)
  • His basket held generic food and drink, nonbrand items in plain white packages with simple labeling.†   (source)
  • "Private message for Molly Reyes," the generic voice from the port calls out.†   (source)
  • The kind of house that is immediately familiar: a generically grand, unchallenging, new, new, new house that my wife would—and did—detest.†   (source)
  • These I don't have any generic name for…"hangups" I suppose.†   (source)
  • "Kennedys" was the generic name for stuff like that.†   (source)
  • The wall-to-wall bookshelves were now filled with academic but generic-looking hardcovers, all bound in neutral colors with gold lettering.†   (source)
  • Peter reached for his commissary form again and checked off the box for a generic greeting card.†   (source)
  • Or he could use a generic, vague spell to block whatever Oromis was doing.†   (source)
  • For although the mother confused their names or called them all by the generic pet name, "Cuquita," and switched their birthdates and their careers, and sometimes forgot which husband or boyfriend went with which daughter, she had a favorite story she liked to tell about each one as a way of celebrating that daughter on special occasions.†   (source)
  • It's one of the generic pictures that gets sold along with the picture frame, a shiny, happy advertisement for all the shiny, happy moments you can capture forever inside the 5" x 7" sterling silver frame with butterfly detail.†   (source)
  • After extracting a few contextfree specifics about the movie from her, I set to work writing an incredibly generic three-page paper about the Industrial Revolution.†   (source)
  • A generic blow-off?†   (source)
  • In a private box above Saratoga Race Course on August 3, 1936, Marcela and Charles Howard surveyed a field of generic $6,000 claimers.†   (source)
  • Sort of generic directions.†   (source)
  • A tall, light-skinned man with generic good looks, Jones was quick to learn that Cedric is a star student.†   (source)
  • I hated the horribly bright school colors, the incredibly generic mascot, and at least ninety percent of the student body.†   (source)
  • An empty room, Gervais had said, and at first I tried to picture white walls, a wood floor, a generic anywhere.†   (source)
  • He will then do a telephone survey using generic names but similar facts to gauge the public's reaction.†   (source)
  • When I was a teenager, I watched it shudder and gasp and finally begin to die, the pines clear-cut into huge patches of muddy wasteland and the character of the little towns murdered by generic subdivisions and generic fast-food restaurants.†   (source)
  • It was under a counter, staring horror-stricken at a bowl of generic dog food.†   (source)
  • The recommendations listed below are pretty generic—they'll be more meaningful once the Course has more of your performances to analyze.†   (source)
  • They looked like generic vitamins or allergy medicine, something ordinary.†   (source)
  • In different regions the same carbonated beverage is known variously as soda, pop, tonic, soft drink, or generically, whatever the flavor, a Coke.†   (source)
  • I thought he said this: "The generic word for 'brother' is brother."†   (source)
  • She wonders, in turn, if this dead immigrant had ever reconsidered the generic still-life of apples he'd hung in the upstairs hall, had ever touched again the bouquet of wooden roses placed on the tank of his toilet, had ever comfortably worn the reams of clothes in his closet, the rack filled with the suits and shoes he would buy on his days off but never wore anywhere.†   (source)
  • Framed posters, generic vintage advertising posters, nothing she'd have chosen.†   (source)
  • In September 2010, we found an e-mail in one of the generic boxes at DuckCommander.com.†   (source)
  • There are also generic versions.†   (source)
  • It was a fairly generic place, one of those two-level faux brick and aluminum siding buildings with exterior doors that all look identical except for their shiny gold numbers.†   (source)
  • Day by day, Wendell is less himself and more generic.†   (source)
  • What he called his wife, once; maybe still does, but really it's a generic term.†   (source)
  • For the prices to be lower, the generic manufacturers would have to get involved.†   (source)
  • Only the generic food is where it was, white packages plainly labeled.†   (source)
  • I'm from a generic place, "over there," which might be Ireland, France, or Italy.†   (source)
  • The poets are being fairly generic in these instances.†   (source)
  • I saw Murray in the generic food area, carrying a Teflon skillet.†   (source)
  • Bud's generic past crowded the display tables.†   (source)
  • I have no generic liking for modest living.†   (source)
  • You think I should kill my baby and replace it with some generic substitute?†   (source)
  • There's a generic resemblance, that's all.†   (source)
  • His face was generically human to me, but the knowledge in my memory applied the wordkind.†   (source)
  • Maybe she just used her generic pattern for SCRAWNY MALE.†   (source)
  • His generic sneakers had made it all the way back, but they were full of holes and stank.†   (source)
  • I used generic names from unremarkable planets.†   (source)
  • Mom thought to ask who he was and I gave a generic answer, which she accepted without comment.†   (source)
  • The generic word for "brother" is brother.†   (source)
  • I passed on my "get well soon" to Phil, and promised to call her with every single detail from Forks High's generic graduation.†   (source)
  • Or did he just order a generic god?†   (source)
  • They have a generic look to them, these wars — the men in camouflage gear with scarves over their mouths and noses, the drifts of smoke, the gutted buildings, the broken, weeping civilians.†   (source)
  • It was obvious that the pastor had never even met Kerry because when he talked about him, it was generic, about what a kind heart Kerry had and how even though it was sad that he was gone, he was getting his "heavenly n. ward.†   (source)
  • The word "generic" here means "when one is unable to think of anything else to say," and Sunny was not alone in this.†   (source)
  • Clothes, bedding, furniture, the pictures on the wallscreen-it had all reverted back to Generic Ugly.†   (source)
  • As kids, we joked that our hometown was so generic that they didn't even bother to give it a real name: It's in the middle of Cincinnati and Dayton, and it's a town, so here we are.†   (source)
  • The bedside lamps, bolted to the tables, were a dead giveaway, as were the long drapes made from the same fabric as the bedspread, and the generic watercolor prints on the walls.†   (source)
  • Generic, bereft of trees, with a sandbox that's always full of animal feces; it is utterly un-Twainy.†   (source)
  • Check.
    Item 32: Change into generic clothes, tuck hair in hat, climb down the banks of the river, and scuttle along the edge, the water lapping inches below, until you reach the edge of the complex.†   (source)
  • Mark Twain gives us the Mississippi, Hart Crane the Hudson-East-Mississippi/generic-American, and T. S. Eliot the Thames.†   (source)
  • I couldn't go out and buy a new car just because I wanted to, but I never had to think about the day-to-day stuff, coupon clipping and buying generic and knowing how much milk costs off the top of my head.†   (source)
  • But the real target is the physical village—as place, as center of mystery and threat, as alien environment, as generic home of potential enemies and uncertain friends.†   (source)
  • We moved into the generic food area and Murray paused with his plastic basket to probe among the white cartons and jars.†   (source)
  • Finally, Bakker announced from his seat, "ida is going to do everything we can to lower prices, by exploring generic manufacturers."†   (source)
  • It's too bad modern writers lost the generic "fever" and the mystery malady when modern medicine got so it could identify virtually any microbe and thereby diagnose virtually any disease.†   (source)
  • "We could use a dq quote here, and a generic inequality-of-outcomes over here," I once heard Farmer say to a young assistant working with him on a speech.†   (source)
  • By invoking not a generic figure—"I am just not cut out to be a tragic hero," for instance—but the most famous tragic hero, Hamlet, Eliot provides an instantly recognizable situation for his protagonist and adds an element of characterization that says more about his self-image than would a whole page of description.†   (source)
  • She asked the woman in charge of the kitchen—she was known as Iron Pants, a generic Haitian nickname for a tough woman—"What if they came in to massacre us?"†   (source)
  • Think generically.†   (source)
  • Ultimately, ida and the renowned organization Doctors Without Borders would took on the task of finding generic manufacturers of second-line drugs. ida even talked some companies into making the drugs, and they assumed responsibility for quality control and distribution.†   (source)
  • The Dutch group's strategy was to ignore the giant multinational drug companies, the ones that mainly rely on research and brand names and patent protection, and to deal instead with the myriad smaller companies that make and sell, at greatly reduced prices, already invented generic drugs under different names (as acetaminophen instead of Tylenol in the United States, for instance).†   (source)
  • Instead of realistic facial portraits, the mummies had the generic wide-eyed, smiling faces I'd seen on most Egyptian death masks.†   (source)
  • Even when he felt the need to say something, he usually volunteered only the most generic comments typical of armchair psychologists.†   (source)
  • Too generic, he concluded.†   (source)
  • The truth of bridges is that they made him feel he was doing some mobius gyration, becoming one-sided, losing all purchase on name and place and food-taste and weekends with the in-laws—hanging sort of unborn in generic space.†   (source)
  • Standing, she threw her purse over her shoulder and fled down the generic tiled hallways until she reached an exit.†   (source)
  • I realize, probably too late, that I wish to leave something of myself, a small service to Bedley Run, and not simply a respectable headstone, but after seeing the generic, forlorn closedness of the store, I feel precipitously insubstantial behind the wheel, like an apparition who has visited too long.†   (source)
  • Generic, plain, white, letter-sized, cheap paper, probably purchased in a box of a hundred for five bucks, adorned with a twenty-five-cent stamp honoring an astronaut, and thick enough to contain several sheets of paper.†   (source)
  • Just put something generic in.†   (source)
  • Think, for example, of how you guys has now become a generic form of address: it is gender-, age-, and class-neutral, and decidedly informal.†   (source)
  • She was mostly invisible, humanly invisible to people in the market down the street and not just youngsters hurrying past a hazy shape in the aisles, the unfocused stuff of middle age, but people in general—okay, men in general—who gave her generic status at best.†   (source)
  • At eleven o'clock the next morning, the bell above University Hall rings and a bagpiper begins playing a generic Scottish march.†   (source)
  • "Because demons are different from us, people have tended to classify them as a generic family of creatures that should be reviled, feared, avoided, or even worshipped," he said.†   (source)
  • Civilization is built, history is driven— He talked in his talk-show way, focused, practiced, generically intimate.†   (source)
  • "Glass Spires," I told her, using the rather generic name of a herd member from my time with the Bears.†   (source)
  • So that she had to cast down these eyes a little to be decent with her endowment, that height of the bosom and form of hips and other generic riches, smooth and soft, that may take the early person, the little girl, by surprise in their ampleness when they come on.†   (source)
  • May I ask your Christian and generic names?†   (source)
  • Amongst all nations, generic and abstract terms form the basis of language.†   (source)
  • The accursed shark alone can in any generic respect be said to bear comparative analogy to him.†   (source)
  • The party was made up of what Mrs. Trenor called "poky people"—her generic name for persons who did not play bridge—and, it being her habit to group all such obstructionists in one class, she usually invited them together, regardless of their other characteristics.†   (source)
  • The multitude thus pronounces judgment on its own units: it admits itself unfit to govern, and will vote only for a man morphologically and generically transfigured by palatial residence and equipage, by transcendent tailoring, by the glamor of aristocratic kinship.†   (source)
  • This profound generic view of the female sex did not seem to dispose Haley particularly to the straight road, and he announced decidedly that he should go the other, and asked Sam when they should come to it.†   (source)
  • He was one of those lads that grow everywhere in England, and at twelve or thirteen years of age look as much alike as goslings,—a lad with light-brown hair, cheeks of cream and roses, full lips, indeterminate nose and eyebrows,—a physiognomy in which it seems impossible to discern anything but the generic character to boyhood; as different as possible from poor Maggie's phiz, which Nature seemed to have moulded and colored with the most decided intention.†   (source)
  • These men who grouped themselves under different appellations, but who may all be designated by the generic title of socialists, endeavored to pierce that rock and to cause it to spout forth the living waters of human felicity.†   (source)
  • Every book supplies its time with one good word; every municipal law, every trade, every folly of the day, and the generic catholic genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the originality of all, stands with the next age as the recorder and embodiment of his own.†   (source)
  • Of the Lenni Lenape, or as they were called by the whites, from the circumstances of their holding their great council-fire on the banks of that river, the Delaware nation, the principal tribes, besides that which bore the generic name, were the Mahicanni, Mohicans, or Mohegans, and the Nanticokes, or Nentigoes.†   (source)
  • And it is impossible for me to say that Mr. Irwine was altogether belied by the generic classification assigned him.†   (source)
  • …the chimneys, for want of air to make a draught, were built in an immense variety of stunted and crooked shapes, as though every house put out a sign of the kind of people who might be expected to be born in it; among the multitude of Coketown, generically called 'the Hands,' — a race who would have found more favour with some people, if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands, or, like the lower creatures of the seashore, only hands and stomachs — lived a certain Stephen…†   (source)
  • A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life had departed.†   (source)
  • Divers negroes, in very free-and-easy pantaloons, and with no redundancy in the shirt line, were scuttling about, hither and thither, without bringing to pass any very particular results, except expressing a generic willingness to turn over everything in creation generally for the benefit of Mas'r and his guests.†   (source)
  • What our forefathers designated as honor absolutely was in reality only one of its forms; they gave a generic name to what was only a species.†   (source)
  • Elizabeth took an opportunity, during this expenditure of polite expressions, to purchase the powder privately of the boy, who bore the generic appellation of Jonathan.†   (source)
  • But, besides the application to him of the generic remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly efficient in those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies continually recurring in a large ship, upon a three or four years' voyage, in uncivilized and far-distant seas.†   (source)
  • This liking for general ideas is displayed in democratic languages by the continual use of generic terms or abstract expressions, and by the manner in which they are employed.†   (source)
  • Democratic nations are passionately addicted to generic terms or abstract expressions, because these modes of speech enlarge thought, and assist the operations of the mind by enabling it to include several objects in a small compass.†   (source)
  • 25 The problem for translators, then, is to know whether a given word is being used for effect and when it is more generic.†   (source)
  • Not a lot of people know this, but my favorite thing in the world is a poorly made car commercial with generic guitar music in the backGROUN GAARRGGHH†   (source)
  • So Mom and I sat there in two generic institutional chairs in the hallway and tried to get all the crying out of our system, and eventually I was able to talk in short little bursts.†   (source)
  • There remained the generic conditions imposed by natural, as distinct from human law, as integral parts of the human whole: the necessity of destruction to procure alimentary sustenance: the painful character of the ultimate functions of separate existence, the agonies of birth and death: the monotonous menstruation of simian and (particularly) human females extending from the age of puberty to the menopause: inevitable accidents at sea, in mines and factories: certain very painful…†   (source)
  • Once it becomes, in Oliver Wendell Holmes' phrase, "a cheap generic term, a substitute for differentiated [Pg311] specific expressions," it quickly acquires such flatness that the fastidious flee it as a plague.†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)