initiate

in a sentence

grouped by contextual meaning

We are encouraging local authorities to initiate long-term emergency planning.

The A.G. will most likely initiate an investigation.  (source) Louis Sachar, Holes, 1998

Is he simply working the Lover Boy angle he initiated at the interview?  (source) Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, 2008

Believe me, he is a walking time bomb … capable of initiating a series of events that will profoundly change the world as you know it.  (source) Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol, 2009

The Hotel People liked to tell their guests that the oldest of the wooden houses, with its airtight, paneled storeroom which could hold enough rice to feed an army for a year had been the ancestral home of Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad, "Kerala's Mao Tse-tung," they explained to the uninitiated.†  (source) Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, 1997

Now she was eagerly curious to know what had decided the Beauforts to invite (for the first time) Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, the widow of Struthers's Shoe-polish, who had returned the previous year from a long initiatory sojourn in Europe to lay siege to the tight little citadel of New York.†  (source) Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, 1920

I don't think she had even initiated anything.  (source) Misty Bernall, She Said Yes, 1999

This time, I needed to be the initiator.†  (source) Kiera Cass, The Selection, 2012

I want him to fold me into his arms again, like he did after the last attack, but he doesn't, and I know better than to initiate it.  (source) Veronica Roth, Insurgent, 2012

He had become addicted to The Story of O, School Girls in Paris, and Voluptuous Initiations.†  (source) James Patterson, Kiss the Girls, 1995

I mean, we talk occasionally at track practice, but he's ALWAYS the one who initiates it—just ask anyone on the team.  (source) Melody Carlson, Becoming Me, 2000

Sophon One is capable of initiating spatial dimensionality adjustments at any moment.†  (source) Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem, 2008

To the uninitiated, he still looked every bit as ordinary as he could, except around the eyes, but he no longer wore his contacts and no one took the time to look past his thick lenses anymore.†  (source) Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones, 2002

The author uses the character to initiate his readers to life and norms within an American high-security prison.

For by now, in addition to the workers whom we wanted to initiate into the system [of quickly hiding from the Gestapo], we had three more permanent boarders:  (source) Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place, 1971

Peter initiated me into this long ago.  (source) Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol, 2009

And you recall how you plunged with the Founder, the Leader, deep into the black art of escape, guided at first, indeed, initiated, by the seemingly demented one who had learned his craft in slavery.  (source) Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952

Her whole soul was possessed by the fact that a fuller life was opening before her: she was a neophyte about to enter on a higher grade of initiation.  (source) George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1872

Thus the inhabitants of the South would not be able, like their Northern countrymen, to initiate the slaves gradually into a state of freedom by abolishing slavery; they have no means of perceptibly diminishing the black population, and they would remain unsupported to repress its excesses.  (source) Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy In America, Volume 1, 1835

But mainly, when the uninitiated stood before Ida Paine, they found themselves thinking that the future was preordained.  (source) David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, 2008

New prisoners are largely of two kinds—there are those who for shame, fear or shock wait in fascinated horror to be initiated into the lore of prison life, and there are those who trade on their wretched novelty in order to endear themselves to the community.  (source) John Le Carre, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, 1963

...and her imagination was fired by the thought that Mr. Gryce, who might have sounded the depths of the most complex self-indulgence, was perhaps actually taking his first journey alone with a pretty woman. It struck her as providential that she should be the instrument of his initiation.  (source) Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, 1905

Miss Blount, a native Maycombian as yet uninitiated in the mysteries of the Decimal System, appeared at the door hands on hips and announced: "If I hear another sound from this room I'll burn up everybody in it."  (source) Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960

She accordingly installed herself in the Madison Avenue house, and Percy, whose sense of duty was not inferior to his mother's, spent all his week days in the handsome Broad Street office where a batch of pale men on small salaries had grown grey in the management of the Gryce estate, and where he was initiated with becoming reverence into every detail of the art of accumulation.  (source) Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, 1905

That more complete teaching would come—Mr. Casaubon would tell her all that: she was looking forward to higher initiation in ideas, as she was looking forward to marriage, and blending her dim conceptions of both.  (source) George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1872

The French codes are often difficult of comprehension, but they can be read by every one; nothing, on the other hand, can be more impenetrable to the uninitiated than a legislation founded upon precedents.  (source) Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy In America, Volume 1, 1835

My mother couldn't attend my Honor Society initiation ceremony.

"Count yourself initiated," she said. "You can't be a true beekeeper without getting stung."  (source) Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees, 2002

I got beat worse than this when I got initiated.  (source) Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give, 2017

The boys and I forgive your weakness, but you still have to be initiated into our group.  (source) Dave Pelzer, The Lost Boy, 1997

I was so focused on getting through initiation that I barely thought about it.  (source) Veronica Roth, Divergent, 2011

Masonic initiations were startling because they were meant to be transformative.  (source) Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol, 2009

They signed up as "trainees" on the spot. We began to meet every night to initiate them.  (source) John Knowles, A Separate Peace, 1959

Then he would show his wealth by initiating his sons into the ozo society.  (source) Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 1958

One of the greatest crimes a man could commit was to unmask an egwugwu in public, or to say or do anything which might reduce its immortal prestige in the eyes of the uninitiated.  (source) Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 1958

I have a lot of respect for Hector because he's the guy who initiated me into the Latino Blood.  (source) Simone Elkeles, Perfect Chemistry, 2009

Sneaking out to her shack, running through the dark and tagging it, had become a regular tradition, an initiation for boys becoming men.  (source) Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing, 2018

You've got one of the worst initiations, and there's that whole old-age thing.  (source) Veronica Roth, Insurgent, 2012

Sweeping an arm in our direction, one of the rebels announced, "We are going to initiate all of you by killing these people in front of you."  (source) Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone, 2007

Please fill out the new initiate information form.

"Scared of the dark, Mar?" the dark-eyed Dauntless-born initiate teases.  (source) Veronica Roth, Divergent, 2011

When I graduated from initiate training, Menshikov requested I be assigned to his nome.  (source) Rick Riordan, The Throne of Fire, 2011

The thirty-four-year-old initiate gazed down at the human skull cradled in his palms.  (source) Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol, 2009

As the night wore on, Puppet, Ragman and Nat had the initiates pile into a pickup truck.  (source) Luis J. Rodriguez, Always Running, 1992

But even if Mikhailov did initiate CyberStorm, and we know how, it doesn't address the question of why he was able to do it.†  (source) Matthew Mather, Cyberstorm, 2013

That the ethnic mix of the counselors roughly mirrors the composition of the fifty-two wide-eyed initiates is not lost on Cedric...  (source) Ron Suskind, A Hope in the Unseen, 1998

To initiate the Count's course of study, Nina quite sensibly began at the bottom—the basement and its network of corridors and cul-de-sacs.†  (source) Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow, 2016

Probably its regular visitants, like the initiates of freemasonry, wished that there were something a little more tremendous to keep to themselves concerning it; but they were not a closed community, and many decent seniors as well as juniors occasionally turned into the billiard-room to see what was going on.  (source) George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1872

I tried to initiate the link, but it seemed to have been disabled.†  (source) Marissa Meyer, Cinder, 2012

Temple initiates used to accompany the pilgrims to the mountains.†  (source) Dan Simmons, Hyperion, 1989

I know you didn't initiate the transfer, and I think even Harold knows it, but people are getting suspicious and wondering how you and Rose got Larry to give you the place, when obviously the whole thing is driving him crazy.†  (source) Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres, 1991

Those subtle jokes for the musical initiates are lost on an ignoramus such as myself.†  (source) Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor, 2003