Sample Sentences for

solvent

grouped by contextual meaning

(editor-reviewed)

Gimme a nylon bristle detail brush, some nitrile gloves, and maybe a can of that aerosol cleaning solvent.  (source) Rick Riordan, The Lost Hero, 2010

The mine had a lot of the solvent derived from coal tar, but it was too volatile.  (source) Homer Hickam, October Sky, 1998

It was a million miles from the machine-stamped, anonymous vehicles of her fraternity dates with their ventless windows, fold-up steering wheels, and vaguely unpleasant smell of plastic seat covers and windshield solvent.  (source) Stephen King, Carrie, 1974

Sticking a patch into the loop, he dipped it in solvent.  (source) Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes, 2007

The janitorial closet smelled pungently of bleach and cleaning solvents.  (source) Carl Hiassen, Hoot, 2002

On other days in other years, he had called her "the rabbit in the hat" and "the universal solvent" and "the recycler of our garbage."  (source) Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl, 2000

Sometimes they find tins of motor oil, caustic solvents, plastic bottles of bleach.  (source) Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 2003

One of the shop workers, a lanky, bony-cheeked young man named Dominguez, was by the solvent sink, wiping grease off a wheel.  (source) Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, 2003

As we approached the bare wooden table smeared with solvents, an instinctive silence fell over us.†  (source) Esi Edugyan, Washington Black, 2018

Solvent.†  (source) Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, 1997

Behind it was a matching pair of oaken Italian easels, two halogen lamps, a Nikon camera mounted atop a tripod, a palette, a tiny bale of cotton wool, an ancient CD player smudged with several different colors of paint, and a trolley laden with pigments, medium, solvents, wooden dowels, and several Winsor & Newton Series 7 sable-hair paintbrushes.†  (source) Daniel Silva, The Black Widow, 2016

People didn't realize that Willie was trying to make Duck Commander financially solvent, and with the TV show, he was appealing to a much broader audience.†  (source) Willie & Korie Robertson, The Duck Commander Family, 2012

"You got a biohazard team?" asked Puller, putting a hand over his mouth and nose to shield his lungs from the smell of solvents and chemicals.†  (source) David Baldacci, Zero Day, 2011

I was happy, solvent, successful.  (source) Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train, 2015

If my father could sit tight until our place seethed with this life and movement, he would, Ty was sure, be reborn into a contented retirement, busy, as the farmers at the café said, solvent, and interested.  (source) Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres, 1991

Social Security just got solvent overnight.  (source) John Ringo, Live Free or Die, 2010

It had been kind to me in the days of my poverty and it did not resent my temporary solvency.†  (source) John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley, 1962

Sullivan was thirty-eight and incapable of cultivating the relationships that might have generated enough new commissions to keep him solvent.  (source) Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City, 2003

I was glad to be shut of my job—the first and only salaried position, excluding the military, of my life—even though its loss seriously undermined my already modest solvency.†  (source) William Styron, Sophie's Choice, 1976

It was also the number that bounced off the walls at the café in town, the number that other farmers fantasized about and "knew" was the best economy of scale, not too large for a family operation but enough to keep you busy, solvent, and interested.  (source) Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres, 1991

For, we always ran into new debt immediately, to the full extent of the margin, and sometimes, in the sense of freedom and solvency it imparted, got pretty far on into another margin.†  (source) Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, 1861

His guests would bring whiskey out with them but he drank of this with a sort of sparing calculation as though keeping mentally, General Compson said, a sort of balance of spiritual solvency between the amount of whiskey he accepted and the amount of running meat which he supplied to the guns.†  (source) William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 1936

He played havoc among the nine-pins, and won half a crown, which restored him to solvency.†  (source) D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, 1913

The women, indeed, usually entered the church at once, and the farmers' wives talked in an undertone to each other, over the tall pews, about their illnesses and the total failure of doctor's stuff, recommending dandelion-tea, and other home-made specifics, as far preferable—about the servants, and their growing exorbitance as to wages, whereas the quality of their services declined from year to year, and there was no girl nowadays to be trusted any further than you could see her—about the bad price Mr. Dingall, the Treddleston grocer, was giving for butter, and the reasonable doubts that might be held as to his solvency, notwithstanding that Mrs. Dingall was a sensible woman, and they were†  (source) George Eliot, Adam Bede, 1859

He seems to have intended to use the church into which he had invested a certain amount of sacrifice and doubtless self-denial and certainly actual labor and money for the sake of what might be called a demand balance of spiritual solvency, exactly as he would have used a cotton gin in which he considered himself to have incurred either interest or responsibility, for the ginning of any cotton which he or any member of his family, by blood or by marriage, had raised—that, and no more.†  (source) William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 1936

And doubtless what hurt him most in the whole business with Sutpen was not the loss of the money but the fact that he had had to sacrifice the hoarding, the symbol of the fortitude and abnegation, to keep intact the spiritual solvency which he believed that he had already established and secured.†  (source) William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 1936