Sample Sentences for
compel
(editor-reviewed)

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    but as his wife — at his side always, and always restrained, and always checked — forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame consumed vital after vital — this would be unendurable.  (source)
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    To remedy this, he ate as fast as they; and, so greatly did hunger compel him, he was not above taking what did not belong to him.  (source)
    compel = drive
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    As it was, we were compelled to hold our heads high and be, respectively, a gentleman and a lady.  (source)
    compelled = forced
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Show 10 more with 6 word variations
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    She wanted to run, breathless as she was, up-stairs to Mr. Linton's room; but I compelled her to sit down on a chair, and...  (source)
    compelled = forced
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    I seemed, despite her better impulses, to compel her.†  (source)
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    I'm here because I've got this vision of justice that compels me to be a witness.†  (source)
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    When she shopped (there were twenty stores in Jefferson now) she unbent without even getting out of the carriage, gracious and assured and talking the most complete nonsense, voluble, speaking her bright set meaningless phrases out of the part which she had written for herself, of the duchess peripatetic with property soups and medicines among a soilless and uncompelled peasantry—a woman who, if she had had the fortitude to bear sorrow and trouble, might have risen to actual stardom in the role of the matriarch arbitrating from the fireside corner of a crone the pride and destiny of her family, instead of turning at the last to the youngest member of it and asking her to protect the others.†  (source)
    standard prefix: The prefix "un-" in uncompelled means not and reverses the meaning of compelled. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
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    When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion—or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with that velocity and with that direction it will ever revisit this system, since its orbit does not look like a returning curve—with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths, like many a downy cloud which I have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its masses to the light—as if this traveling demigod, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery of his train;†  (source)
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    No one was ever able to discover how, and by what connivance, he succeeded in procuring, and secreting a bottle of wine, invented, so it is said, by Desrues, with which a narcotic is mixed, and which the band of the Endormeurs, or Sleep-compellers, rendered famous.†  (source)
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    So he compelled himself to read the last paragraph slowly—with his head, not his heart, so that he could understand it.  (source)
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    She said a ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel.†  (source)
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    I whisper back, because something in the conspiracy compels it, "Bodies?"†  (source)
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    And everywhere men walked their own destinies, uncompelled.†  (source)
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