toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

instructive
in a sentence

show 127 more with this conextual meaning
  • And under the pressing fingers and the quiet instructive voice, she would.†   (source)
  • When I was developing the Dauntless simulations, years ago, we discovered that certain levels of potency overwhelmed the brain and made it too insensible with terror to invent new surroundings, which was when we diluted the solution so that the simulations would be more instructive.†   (source)
  • We seek not resemblances but differences, choose the most accentuated differences because they're the most striking and also the most instructive.†   (source)
  • It was to be both instructive and true, she said.†   (source)
  • For a long minute he hovered, his back to the church as the instructive words kept falling around the room, rich with promise, full with warnings.†   (source)
  • In Cange in early 1984, Farmer had another memorable encounter with malaria, in its way as instructive as the one back in Léogâne.†   (source)
  • It's quite instructive, don't you think?†   (source)
  • I found the trip instructive in another way because in that hospital I sensed a thawing in the relationship between black and white.†   (source)
  • As I passed Alex, she grumbled, "Thanks, that was very instructive."†   (source)
  • An early rivalry between two star players proved particularly instructive for Luma.†   (source)
  • It is instructive to look at a chart of the crime rate in New York City from, say, the mid1960s to the late 1990s.†   (source)
  • Thank you for this instructive day.†   (source)
  • That was very instructive, although you would have done well to omit your last words.†   (source)
  • In that case, I said to myself, Hamid's silence must be instructive!†   (source)
  • "And you'd lose the very instructive example you could make, letting everyone watch you line up nearly all of Ime's Administration on the station concourse and shoot them in the head, one after the other."†   (source)
  • I want to thank you for a most instructive experience!†   (source)
  • The small, bald man was not only garrulously instructive, but in his own way mesmerizing.†   (source)
  • It will be expected of you, my son, that as you are favored with superior advantages under the instructive eye of a tender parent, that your improvements should bear some proportion to your advantages.†   (source)
  • He's given me an instructive explanation.†   (source)
  • If it was true, Abby thought, that she represented a recurring figure in Mrs. Whitshank's life—the "sympathizer"—it was equally true that Mrs. Whitshank's type had shown up before in Abby's life: the instructive older woman.†   (source)
  • It has instructive analogies to our Confederation of the American States.†   (source)
  • General Lee's various stratagems will be most instructive, most illuminating.†   (source)
  • 25 "A maximum of instructive shrecklichkeit with minimum loss of life.†   (source)
  • It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.†   (source)
  • The case of India is particularly instructive.†   (source)
  • But even if such narrowly focused animosity against an Oriental foe had not been real, most people could scarcely have known about the Nazi death camps, and this makes Steiner's ruminations all the more instructive.†   (source)
  • I was fooling myself that this was important or even instructive.†   (source)
  • He loved to talk about himself and nothing could have been more instructive to me.†   (source)
  • She opens the book across their knees and leans in his direction, gravely instructive.†   (source)
  • The posture of the body is important, here and now: minor discomforts are instructive.†   (source)
  • His voice was highpitched but deliberate, instructive.†   (source)
  • These trips were instructive on a number of levels.†   (source)
  • Nevertheless, it is instructive to observe the details.†   (source)
  • Before she went, she left Sophie with a few last instructive words.†   (source)
  • That last part was mildly aggravating: Crake could be a little too instructive sometimes, and a little too free with the shoulds.†   (source)
  • 'To Miss Hermione Jean Granger, I leave my copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, in the hope that she will find it entertaining and instructive.'†   (source)
  • His previous experiences with the odd device that stored and revealed thoughts and memories, though highly instructive, had also been uncomfortable.†   (source)
  • Do not overlook a plentiful source of nutrition that may be no farther away than your feet, says another voice, in an annoying, instructive tone he recognizes from a survival manual he once leafed through in someone else's bathroom.†   (source)
  • One whole wall was devoted to instructive commands regarding vowels; over the doorway of the bathroom was the single exclamation: Gently!†   (source)
  • This puts him in an instructive mood, and I can see he is going to teach me something, which gentlemen are fond of doing.†   (source)
  • Owen thought it was cruel that Bette Davis had to find out she was dying all by herself; but Dark Victory is one of those movies that presumes to be instructive on the subject of how to die.†   (source)
  • This is instructive.†   (source)
  • I saw a great deal of soccer over the next few months, but the most moving moments for me—and the most instructive and insightful—came not on the sidelines but over hot cups of sugary tea, over meals of stewed cassava or beans and rice, or platters of steaming Afghan mantu, on the sofas and floors of the apartments of refugees in Clarkston.†   (source)
  • His success that first day convinced me that associations with a multitude of people would be beneficial and instructive to my students.†   (source)
  • Just before Pearl Harbor—Mr. Field went on in his quiet instructive tone—the Federal government opened bidding among fabricators of molded plastic for the manufacture of this dinky object, a bare two inches long, irregular in outline and containing at one end a squiggly bulge which had to fit into a similarly shaped aperture with absolute precision.†   (source)
  • It was very instructive.†   (source)
  • My father, before he met an unfortunate accident …. my father was a great admirer of Julius Streicher for this reason—he applauded the way in which Herr Streicher has satirized so instructively this degenerate trait in the Jewish character.†   (source)
  • Sometimes he was caustic; sometimes to Thoby especially instructive.†   (source)
  • Margie was using a very instructive motherly tone of voice, as if she were teaching me my catechism.†   (source)
  • "Eavesdroppers often hear highly entertaining and instructive things," he grinned.†   (source)
  • "Eavesdroppers often hear highly instructive things," jibed a memory.†   (source)
  • This is to be read as symbolic and instructive of the miracle of destiny.†   (source)
  • In our dreams the ageless perils, gargoyles, trials, secret helpers, and instructive figures are nightly still encountered; and in their forms we may seereflected not only the whole picture of our present case, but also the clue to what we must do to be saved.†   (source)
  • A fortnight after the Winchester tournament, while Elaine nursed her hero back to life, Guenever was having a scene with Sir Bors at court Being a woman-hater, Bors always had instructive scenes with women.†   (source)
  • Meanwhile it was in a terrible way instructive to see how Oliver behaved, how unruffled he tried to appear.†   (source)
  • I had committed myself earlier to spend the Easter vacation with Collins and, though I would have broken my word without compunction, and left my former friend friendless, had Sebastian made a sign, no sign was made; accordingly Collins and I spent several economical and instructive weeks together in Ravenna.†   (source)
  • And beside, the waiting room where all the patients gathered was so homelike, and the people so fluent in English that it was both pleasant and instructive to be among them.†   (source)
  • From Grandma Fontaine, who was belching frankly with the privilege of her age, to seventeen-year-old Alice Munroe, struggling against the nausea of a first pregnancy, they had their heads together in the endless genealogical and obstetrical discussions that made such gatherings very pleasant and instructive affairs.†   (source)
  • 25 To protect the unprepared, mythology veils such ultimate revelations under half-obscuring guises, while yet insisting on the gradually instructive form.†   (source)
  • Whereupon the great field of instructive wonder shifted—to the skies—and mankind enacted the great pantomime of the sacred moon-king, the sacred sun-king, the hieratic, planetary state, and the symbolic festivals of the world-regulating spheres.†   (source)
  • An amusing and instructive example of a great hero's abject failure will be found in the Finnish Kalevala, Runos IV—VIII, where Vainamoinen fails in his wooing, first of Aino, and then of the "maid of Pohjola.†   (source)
  • In the first are encountered the instructive experiences of life; in the second these are digested, assimilated to the inner forces of the dreamer; while in the third all is enjoyed and known unconsciously, in the "space within the heart," the room of the inner controller, the source and end of all. i2 228 The cosmogonic cycle is to be understood as the passage of universal consciousness from the deep sleep zone of the unmanifest, through dream, to the full day of waiting; then back…†   (source)
  • Was it very edifying and instructive?" asked Aglaya.†   (source)
  • But the maiden herself was most instructive.†   (source)
  • —Why then, said Mr Casey, it is a most instructive story.†   (source)
  • I find it most instructive to follow your train of thought.†   (source)
  • Burke's speech was more instructive than any other book on a political subject that I had ever read.†   (source)
  • Chapter XXI -- Interesting and Instructive Vicissitudes of a Persian in the Cellars of the Opera.†   (source)
  • Well, there is nothing very instructive in all this.†   (source)
  • Days, even months, passed by unheeded in one rapid and instructive course.†   (source)
  • "I suppose you consider this an instructive practice for him," said Augustine, drily.†   (source)
  • 'Yes, yes,' began Bazarov; 'it's a lesson to you, my young friend, an instructive example.†   (source)
  • "Please, ma'am, could I inquire if this highly instructive and charming institution is a new one?"†   (source)
  • Explain yourself, Mousqueton; your conversation is full of instructive things.†   (source)
  • Now he had forgotten about it and her toilet offended him, but he concealed his vexation when he remembered that he had himself insisted on their securing a box and going because it would be an instructive and aesthetic pleasure for the children.†   (source)
  • I think it was all the more interesting and instructive because we went for most of the way on one of the slow, old-fashioned canal-boats.†   (source)
  • Especially actual quotations—even though their lives are so interesting and, as Mrs. Warren said, so morally instructive.†   (source)
  • It was instructive for Carley to see him run his skillful fingers all through that flour, as if searching for lumps.†   (source)
  • He then had it returned and obtained another—a most instructive incident, since it proved conclusively to my mind that we were dealing with a real hound, as no other supposition could explain this anxiety to obtain an old boot and this indifference to a new one.†   (source)
  • The examination of the only man able and willing to face it was beating futilely round the well-known fact, and the play of questions upon it was as instructive as the tapping with a hammer on an iron box, were the object to find out what's inside.†   (source)
  • " Which drew from Bloch nothing more instructive than "Sir, I am absolutely incapable of telling you whether it has rained.†   (source)
  • Surrounded by parents, relatives, friends, suitors, and instructive schools of every kind, colleges, institutions, is she really happy, is she really living?†   (source)
  • It was a mere digression, an instructive example to sensitize them to the basics of life, an impromptu fantasy, which he then dropped to turn his official and emphatic emotional engagement back to the immediate demands of the late hour's festive abandon.†   (source)
  • But it is morally instructive to know that he was a good student and educated himself, in striking contrast to the loose ways and so-called aristocratic society-life of Lord Byron, on which I have just spoken.†   (source)
  • —posture, or from some other equally profound cause, were twice as instructive and twenty times more amusing than the usual respectable thief of commerce you fellows ask to sit at your table without any real necessity—from habit, from cowardice, from good-nature, from a hundred sneaking and inadequate reasons.†   (source)
  • The latter is always instructive.†   (source)
  • It had stopped, having fallen from his nightstand one day, and he had refrained from having it put into measuring rotation again—for the same reasons he had long ago dispensed with calendars, whether the kind you tear off each day or the kind that provide an instructive preview of days and feasts, for reasons of "freedom," that is.†   (source)
  • This instructive entertainment took place after second breakfast, and, as Joachim likewise informed him, it was not permitted, or was at the very least frowned upon, for anyone to absent himself—and it was therefore considered an amazing license that Settembrini, who surely was fluent in German as few others were, not only had never attended these lectures, but also vilified them at length.†   (source)
  • *o Nothing can be more curious and, at the same time more instructive, than the legislation of that period; it is there that the solution of the great social problem which the United States now present to the world is to be found.†   (source)
  • After this, three pages were left blank in the diary, and then the following was written: I have had a long and instructive talk alone with Brother V., who advised me to hold fast by brother A. Though I am unworthy, much was revealed to me.†   (source)
  • Days at a time have I travelled them alone, without feeling the want of company; and, as for conversation, for such as can comprehend their language, there is no want of rational and instructive discourse.†   (source)
  • This accomplished man condescended to think of a young girl, and take the pains to talk to her, not with absurd compliment, but with an appeal to her understanding, and sometimes with instructive correction.†   (source)
  • If I have acquired an interest in hearing of your instructive experiences, and can scarcely hear enough of them, I claim no merit for that, since I believe it is a general sentiment.'†   (source)
  • And of all types and kinds, what can be more instructive than the leadership of a group within a group?†   (source)
  • …to the bottom of some matter which in time past would have been thought quite trivial, as, for example, the due proportions of alkali and oil for soap-making for the village wash, or the exact heat of the water into which a leg of mutton should be plunged for boiling—all this joined to the utter absence of anything like party feeling, which even in a village assembly would certainly have made its appearance in an earlier epoch, was very amusing, and at the same time instructive.†   (source)
  • The catalogue alone of the books we read with this object would fill a whole chapter, which, although it might be very instructive, would certainly afford our readers but little amusement.†   (source)
  • I am happy to have under my charge now the daughters of many of those who were your contemporaries at my establishment—what pleasure it would give me if your own beloved young ladies had need of my instructive superintendence!†   (source)
  • He had not yet spoken, and something consolatory and instructive was expected from so renowned a chief on an occasion of such interest.†   (source)
  • It is an old house in a back street—I forget where—but you'll find out—and there are crowds of interesting things—skeletons, teeth, old pots and pans, ancient boots and shoes, birds' eggs—all charmingly instructive.†   (source)
  • This is instructive at the same time.†   (source)
  • Your most instructive pamphlet has been widely circulated through the patronage of the bishop, and has been of appreciable service….†   (source)
  • Aunt woke up and, being more good-natured after her nap, told me to read a bit and show what frivolous work I preferred to the worthy and instructive Belsham.†   (source)
  • It is often instructive to take the woman's, the private and domestic, view of a public man; nor can anything be more curious than the vast discrepancy between portraits intended for engraving and the pencil-sketches that pass from hand to hand behind the original's back.†   (source)
  • You need only forget to ask how the will of heroes produces events, and such histories as Thiers' will be interesting and instructive and may perhaps even possess a tinge of poetry.†   (source)
  • As they made that well-known journey, which almost every Englishman of middle rank has travelled since, there might have been more instructive, but few more entertaining, companions than Mrs. Major O'Dowd.†   (source)
  • For he had been as instructive as Milton's "affable archangel;" and with something of the archangelic manner he told her how he had undertaken to show (what indeed had been attempted before, but not with that thoroughness, justice of comparison, and effectiveness of arrangement at which Mr. Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed.†   (source)
  • The Battle of Borodino, with the occupation of Moscow that followed it and the flight of the French without further conflicts, is one of the most instructive phenomena in history.†   (source)
  • When we see how cruel statesmen and warriors can be to the human race, and how absurd distinguished men can be to their acquaintance, it will be instructive to observe the instances multiply of pacific, acquiescing manners; and to find how compatible it is to be great and domestic, enviable and yet good-humored.†   (source)
  • If benefits have resulted to our country from these services, let it always be remembered to your praise, and as an instructive example in our annals, that under circumstances in which the passions, agitated in every direction, were liable to mislead, amidst appearances sometimes dubious, vicissitudes of fortune often discouraging, in situations in which not unfrequently want of success has countenanced the spirit of criticism, the constancy of your support was the essential prop of…†   (source)
  • These statistics, however accidental and therefore uninstructive they may appear, as they have a certain completeness, have a certain value also.†   (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "un-" in uninstructive means not and reverses the meaning of instructive. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
  • Not the head," he added instructively, "for the blade may slip off easy.†   (source)
  • A most instructive discussion.†   (source)
  • Lardner's baseball player, though he has pen in hand and is on his guard, and is thus very careful to write /would not/ instead of /wouldn't/ and even /am not/ instead of /ain't/, offers a comprehensive and highly instructive panorama of popular speech habits.†   (source)
  • Kalipedia, he prophesied, would soon be generally adopted and all the graces of life, genuinely good music, agreeable literature, light philosophy, instructive pictures, plastercast reproductions of the classical statues such as Venus and Apollo, artistic coloured photographs of prize babies, all these little attentions would enable ladies who were in a particular condition to pass the intervening months in a most enjoyable manner.†   (source)
  • It's instructive.†   (source)
  • The trip would benefit health on account of the bracing ozone and be in every way thoroughly pleasurable, especially for a chap whose liver was out of order, seeing the different places along the route, Plymouth, Falmouth, Southampton and so on culminating in an instructive tour of the sights of the great metropolis, the spectacle of our modern Babylon where doubtless he would see the greatest improvement, tower, abbey, wealth of Park lane to renew acquaintance with.†   (source)
  • The children of the Male and Female Foundling Hospital who thronged the windows overlooking the scene were delighted with this unexpected addition to the day's entertainment and a word of praise is due to the Little Sisters of the Poor for their excellent idea of affording the poor fatherless and motherless children a genuinely instructive treat.†   (source)
  • After an instructive discourse by the chairman, a magnificent oration eloquently and forcibly expressed, a most interesting and instructive discussion of the usual high standard of excellence ensued as to the desirability of the revivability of the ancient games and sports of our ancient Panceltic forefathers.†   (source)
  • From the best accounts transmitted of this celebrated institution, it bore a very instructive analogy to the present Confederation of the American States.†   (source)
  • The prudent housekeeper was again dispatched to bring the unhappy culprit before Mr Allworthy, in order, not as it was hoped by some, and expected by all, to be sent to the house of correction, but to receive wholesome admonition and reproof; which those who relish that kind of instructive writing may peruse in the next chapter.†   (source)
  • This may be thought inconsistent in itself, and wide from the business of this book; particularly, I reflect that many of those who may be pleased and diverted with the relation of the wild and wicked part of my story may not relish this, which is really the best part of my life, the most advantageous to myself, and the most instructive to others.†   (source)
  • …one of rare and original invention, for imitating Ovid in burlesque style, I show in it who the Giralda of Seville and the Angel of the Magdalena were, what the sewer of Vecinguerra at Cordova was, what the bulls of Guisando, the Sierra Morena, the Leganitos and Lavapies fountains at Madrid, not forgetting those of the Piojo, of the Cano Dorado, and of the Priora; and all with their allegories, metaphors, and changes, so that they are amusing, interesting, and instructive, all at once.†   (source)
  • The scheme of representation, as a substitute for a meeting of the citizens in person, being at most but very imperfectly known to ancient polity, it is in more modern times only that we are to expect instructive examples.†   (source)
  • I remember," said he, "when I first took to the business, there was a great deal of low stuff that did very well to make folks laugh; but was never calculated to improve the morals of young people, which certainly ought to be principally aimed at in every puppet-show: for why may not good and instructive lessons be conveyed this way, as well as any other?†   (source)
  • When Mr Allworthy had retired to his study with Jenny Jones, as hath been seen, Mrs Bridget, with the good housekeeper, had betaken themselves to a post next adjoining to the said study; whence, through the conveyance of a keyhole, they sucked in at their ears the instructive lecture delivered by Mr Allworthy, together with the answers of Jenny, and indeed every other particular which passed in the last chapter.†   (source)
  • These examples, though as unfit for the imitation, as they are repugnant to the genius, of America, are, notwithstanding, when compared with the fugitive and turbulent existence of other ancient republics, very instructive proofs of the necessity of some institution that will blend stability with liberty.†   (source)
  • …to establishing the equilibrium of power and the peace of that part of the world, all the resources of negotiation were exhausted, and triple and quadruple alliances were formed; but they were scarcely formed before they were broken, giving an instructive but afflicting lesson to mankind, how little dependence is to be placed on treaties which have no other sanction than the obligations of good faith, and which oppose general considerations of peace and justice to the impulse of any…†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)