lapse

in a sentence

grouped by contextual meaning

Her job is to assure there is no lapse of the high standards at their hotels.

In an uncharacteristic lapse, McCandless gave his parents' Annandale address when the arresting officer demanded to know his permanent place of residence.  (source) Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, 1996

...for each lapse the discipline wand came again, escalating to a series of painful lashes that left marks on Asher's legs.  (source) Lois Lowry, The Giver, 1993

It was totally unlike them, this lapse from gentility, and it made them much more interesting.  (source) Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting, 1975

She lapsed into giria, the slangy talk that imitated the pidgin English of uneducated people.  (source) Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game, 1977

Reverend Sykes used his pulpit more freely to express his views on individual lapses from grace:  (source) Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960

I guessed I'd resolved the soul and sin thing by lapsing from my heavy-duty Catholic background, giving up my immortal soul for a blues kind of soul.  (source) Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, 1991

I took an academic interest in the thought of stealing the car, knowing all the time that it would be not so much criminal as meaningless, a lapse into nothing, an escape into nowhere.  (source) John Knowles, A Separate Peace, 1959

Maybe he got it where he learned that language he lapsed into.  (source) Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952

Not that I hadn't had a few lapses—unpredictable glides where things flashed out of control for a few eerie blinks like an ice-skid on a bridge and I saw just how badly things could go, how quick.  (source) Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch, 2013

Others around them tune in to their conversation, raising their heads toward the two men before lapsing back into silent reveries, sinking deep into their own thoughts.†  (source) Heather Morris, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, 2018

He would brook no interference or lapse of focus.  (source) Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl, 2001

Gatsby took an arm of each of us and moved forward into the restaurant, whereupon Mr. Wolfshiem swallowed a new sentence he was starting and lapsed into a somnambulatory abstraction.  (source) F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925

She allowed her life insurance to lapse.

I'm a lapsed vegetarian.

Our correspondence lapsed.

Was he concerned that his old friend was morbidly retracing the footsteps of a lapsed romance?  (source) Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow, 2016

Thousand-guilder notes are being declared invalid. ... The five-hundred notes will lapse at the same time.  (source) Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, 1952

Jon, who is a lapsed Lutheran from Niagara Falls, thought we should go there for our honeymoon.  (source) Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye, 1988

…at one time, some people remembered, there had been a recital of some sort, performed by the official of the lottery, a perfunctory, tuneless chant that had been rattled off duly each year; ... but years and years ago this part of the ritual had been allowed to lapse.  (source) Shirley Jackson, The Lottery, 1948

My father had been a Lutheran in Wisconsin, but they were out of style in New England, so he had become a lapsed Lutheran and then, my mother said, a bitter atheist.  (source) Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, 1971

Whenever a black family moved or suffered a slight reverse in fortune, it usually let its policy lapse and later bought another policy from some other company.  (source) Richard Wright, Black Boy, 1945

In my hand I held three lapsed life insurance policies with perforated seals stamped "Void";  (source) Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952

Whilst England remains, and the crown continues, the privilege shall not lapse.  (source) Mark Twain, The Prince and The Pauper, 1881

Instead, I did something that even as a lapsed Catholic I still did for good luck on nights before exams.  (source) Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, 1991

Frank had lost the left one when his car was broadsided by a pickup truck driven by a nineteen-year-old drunk with lapsed insurance.  (source) Dean Koontz, Sole Survivor, 1997

There was a lapse of almost a fifth of a second between the time she saw the danger and began to run.

She showed a time-lapse video of the flower growing.

So we're talking about a time lapse of forty minutes to an hour and a half after the initial explosion.  (source) Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch, 2013

There is more opportunity in films down there, to say the least, since the only films made in this country are short ones that come on before real movies, about leaves spiraling downward into pools or flowers opening in time-lapse photography, to flute music.  (source) Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye, 1988

...and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes...  (source) Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death, 1850

Twenty-five years seemed to have lapsed between his handing me the letter and my grasping its message.  (source) Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952

...I tried to decipher between lapses into stale sleep, the meaning of Leper's telegram.  (source) John Knowles, A Separate Peace, 1959

City-sized shopping malls were erected in the blink of an eye, and storefronts spread across planets like time-lapse footage of mold devouring an orange.†  (source) Ernest Cline, Ready Player One, 2011

These are the reflections of the first days; but when the lapse of time proves the reality of the evil, then the actual bitterness of grief commences.  (source) Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1831

A full minute lapsed before I started crying.  (source) Ling Ma, Severance, 2019

Islands sank and rose around us like a time-lapse video of the last two millennia.†  (source) Rick Riordan, The Sword of Summer, 2015

Once, years ago in school, I saw a time-lapse holo showing the decomposition of a kangaroo mouse.†  (source) Dan Simmons, Hyperion, 1989

A wall of billowing orange flame grows up silently from the tank farm a mile away, like a time-lapse chrysanthemum.†  (source) Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, 1992