sever

in a sentence

She decided to sever ties with the company after years of disagreement.

The country threatened to sever diplomatic relations over the incident.

A moment later I come across the source of the odor: a plastic garbage bag filled with feathers, down, and the severed wings of several birds.  (source) Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, 1996

Jem sat from after breakfast until sunset and would have remained overnight had not Atticus severed his supply lines.  (source) Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960

...and he drove the blade between the vertebrae and the brain. It was an easy shot now and he felt the cartilage sever.  (source) Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, 1952

SAEED AND NADIA WERE LOYAL, and whatever name they gave their bond they each in their own way believed it required them to protect the other, and so neither talked much of drifting apart, not wanting to inflict a fear of abandonment, while also themselves quietly feeling that fear, the fear of the severing of their tie, the end of the world they had built together, a world of shared experiences in which no one else would share, and a shared intimate language that was unique to them, and a sense that what they might break was special and likely irreplaceable.†  (source) Moshin Hamid, Exit West, 2017

We conferred, agreed that it would be well not to be seen soon, and left severally, myself by a pressure door above the stage leading up to level six.†  (source) Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, 1966

This wandering race, sever'd from other men, Boast yet their intercourse with human arts; The seas, the woods, the deserts, which they haunt, Find them acquainted with their secret treasures: And unregarded herbs, and flowers, and blossoms, Display undreamt-of powers when gather'd by them.†  (source) Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, 1820

It's better to be conservative and take what you can get than take a big gamble and blow it, so Enzo reaches in, even as Raven is looking down at him, and severs Raven's left Achilles tendon.†  (source) Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, 1992

Whereas, failing in her first duty, she hath by that failure failed in all; for whoso, clinging to a rope, severeth it above his hands, must fall; it being no defense to claim that the rest of the rope is sound, neither any deliverance from his peril, as he shall find.†  (source) Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 1889

And Yossarian crawled slowly out of the nose and up on top of the bomb bay and wriggled back into the rear section of the plane — passing the first-aid kit on the way that he had to return for — to treat Snowden for the wrong wound, the yawning, raw, melon-shaped hole as big as a football in the outside of his thigh, the unsevered, blood-soaked muscle fibers inside pulsating weirdly like blind things with lives of their own, the oval, naked wound that was almost a foot long and made Yossarian moan in shock and sympathy the instant he spied it and nearly made him vomit.†  (source) Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1961

Being raised as outcasts in a foreign land had woven an inseverable bond between them.†  (source) Ted Dekker, Black: The Birth of Evil, 2004

And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk.  (source) George Orwell, 1984, 1949