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Use inarticulate in a sentence

Definition of inarticulate:

  • (adjective) without or deprived of the use of speech or words;

Sentence Examples:

There, whence these low rumblings, and sharp, inarticulate cries reached him: he stood up, looking into it, shivering.

He is inarticulate, has not the clear and fluent cynicism of expansive natures wherewith to confess exactly how he stands.

His inarticulate, intuitive perceptions were not of form and color secrets only, but strove to pierce the veil of deeper mysteries in impetuous and dogmatic boyish scorn of all received interpretations.

We doctors become, as it were, both inwardly and outwardly thick-skinned, and, as we become immune to epidemic viruses, so nothing can prevent us from assuming roles as loyal and imperturbable counselors to unadulterated grief and inarticulate despair.

It is probably another instance of that inventive ingenuity of the original chroniclers, which so cleverly imagined a whole line of fabulous kings, to give dignity and importance to the "ancient kingdom" thus carried back to inarticulate prehistoric ages.

The fellow was unpleasing, uninspiring: not the savage leader of a race of stern revolutionary devotees fired by the iron logic of their cause, but the inchoate inarticulate voice of clumsy protest, apologizing and propitiating, even while it protested.

Whilst sitting on the bench, the American had been coherent in his speech, but his fall and resignation to slumber on the pavement had relaxed the tension of his mind, and he grew maudlin and inarticulate.

Now constructive imagination is the queen of those mental functions which meet in what we loosely term "thought"; and imagination is ever most active where, on the outer fringe of the mind's routine work, our inarticulate questionings radiate into the unknown.

Cowper, like Rousseau, might see the world through the distorting haze of a disordered fancy, but the world at large was itself strangely disordered, and the smoldering discontent of the inarticulate masses found an echo in their passionate utterances.

This endless striving of the poor to attach themselves to riches, the altogether formless and therefore super-individual striving of the inarticulate to obtain form by contact, to keep it indefinitely and so gain an existence, is the deepest motive in pairing.

No mythologies are so crude, therefore, none so barbarous, but deserve the attention of the philosophic mind, for they are never the empty fictions of an idle fancy, but rather the utterances, however inarticulate, of an immortal and ubiquitous intuition.

There could be no justice and no wisdom in an occupation policy which imposed upon passive and unorganized and inarticulate Germans the same burdens as it placed upon those who voluntarily banded themselves together in these powerful and notorious gangs.

Picture for a moment a tiny vessel, some fifteen feet over all, whose timbers are of the proverbial egg-shell thickness, shot into an angry, bubbling cauldron, whose tumultuous waters heaved and swirled, hissed and roared, in inarticulate sound and motion.

He moved to the telephone, rummaged through the directory, still talking, the flood of feeling that had for months been impounded within his emotionally inarticulate self rushing now past all barriers, sweeping every last protesting reticence before it.

Alfred uttered a sort of low, inarticulate groan, shaking his hat, a pantomime signifying that Alfred found himself incapable of explaining anything to others, being sufficiently preoccupied with an infinity of problems, each one more difficult of solution than the other.

We are all too apt to measure the gains of our pupils by their proficiency in directly reproducing in a recitation or an examination such matters as they may have learned, and inarticulate power in them is something of which we always underestimate the value.

From a philosophic point of view they talked "foolishness," and they lapsed now and then, under the pressure of what was within them, into inarticulate and unintelligible talk, from which they might emerge into utterance quite beyond their ordinary range.

Then, as if suddenly recollecting his situation, looked at Adela, appeared confused, stammered out a few inarticulate words, and resumed his letter; when finished, he seemed to put it into his pocket, but in reality dropped it at his feet for the basest purpose.

We hear inarticulate noises of disapproval when people gossip in the stalls and occasionally somebody goes so far as to whisper "Don't talk"; the result is that the chatterers chatter rather more quietly for a little while, and soon are as noisy as before.

From the capricious production of inarticulate sounds, and then a few monosyllables that described concrete things and obvious desires, he had gradually acquired an astonishing idiomatic command over the most difficult of Teutonic languages; there was nothing that he could not say.

The little one, unable any longer to endure the dreadful sight, backed to the extreme edge of the sand, covered his face with his hands, and fell to whimpering piteously, an unceasing, hopeless, monotonous little cry, as vague and inarticulate as the wind.

Yet, mingling with this familiar sound, his ear, now morbidly acute, seemed to detect a stranger inarticulate murmur, as of confused and excited voices, swelling up from the mysterious depths to the stars above, and again swallowed up in the gulfs of silence below.

Amid all violent stupidity of speech, a right noble instinct of what is doable and what is not doable never forsakes them: the strong inarticulate men and workers, whom Fact patronizes; of whom, in all difficulty and work whatsoever, there is good augury!

One man, whose leg was amputated close to his body, uttered an inarticulate jabber of broken screams, and rolled, or rather bounced from side to side of a pile of loose cotton, with such violence that two hospital attendants were fully occupied in holding him.

Sylvia saw them vividly, those self-made exiles from the mountains, and felt in them some unacknowledged loyalty to the soil, the barren soil which had borne them, some inarticulate affection which had lived through the heat and rage of their embattled lives.

And it is equally certain that a resolute moral energy, no matter how inarticulate or unequipped with learning its owner may be, extorts from us a respect we should never pay were we not satisfied that the essential root of human personality lay there.

The constraint of her forced attendance, and the insurmountable awkwardness of her situation, made all exertion difficult, and her tones were so languid, and her pronunciation was so inarticulate, that Elinor began seriously to believe that she must still have recourse to Mr Creek.

What is there in the words of an actor, the antics of a clown, or the misfortune of another person, to provoke, under the circumstances mentioned, the peculiar reaction of bodily and facial contortion and inarticulate vocal utterance that, regarded dispassionately, seems almost repulsive?

To this subject some reference has already been made; and nothing more extended need now be added, save only, perhaps, the thought that the encouragement of free public discussion is the proper safeguard against the vagaries and dangers of a suppressed and inarticulate dissent.

Shots and yells, the dull crash of blows, the shouts of men engaged in a death grapple, the sharp crackling of innumerable rifles, the inarticulate moans of pain, the piercing scream of sudden torture, were borne upward to them from out the blackness.

In existing conditions, man can make an alphabet out of the clicks of a needle or the flashes of a mirror, and if his vocal organs were no better than those of a baboon, we cannot imagine him content generation after generation with inarticulate howls and yells.

In its first expression this was but inarticulate, half action, half music, dumbly voicing the emotion through the senses; its rhythms were all for the ear, and it had little meaning beyond the crude representation of some simple human desire and grief.

There were constant conferences hastily got together, sometimes in separate nationalities, sometimes of the whole army; and there being no unity of race or language among them, the whole camp became a babel of confusion, a scene of inarticulate tumult, and a veritable revel of misrule.

The crude and inarticulate force in the individuals of the tribe, or the nomads who only touch for war or passion, must be refined through moral, political, and spiritual relations before it is ready to take the form of poem, anthem, temple, or Plato.

There the American showed himself, four times in five, as a quiet, peaceful, shy figure, rather in the mold of Abraham Lincoln, somewhat sad, sometimes pathetic, once tragic; or like Grant, inarticulate, uncertain, distrustful of himself, still more distrustful of others, and awed by money.

This idea pertinaciously clinging to his mind might have crazed a better heart than that of Horace; him it persecuted with a shuddering chill of inarticulate suggestions which paled his cheeks, yet stirred his mind with the wild excitement of temptation and crime.

With a love almost impersonal in its unconscious motherliness, she yearned with the mighty power of her woman's body and soul to protect this immature and inarticulate being who was faring forth to the peninsula of the "Dead English" to make his silent sacrifice.

The great play was written around him, a blur of disasters and ecstasies, a sort of vast and inarticulate Greek chorus mumbling an obbligato to the leitmotif which is at the moment the purchase of a pair of suspenders or a dinner invitation for the evening.

The two northern wizards were the first who, without compunction or dread, uttered in their mother tongue the true and proper names of those dynamical concepts, which the magicians of old were wont to invoke only by the aid of muttered symbols and inarticulate equations.

It is very easy to generalize from the mass: the dweller of the slums stands before the mind's eye, beery, unwashed, in rags, inarticulate, his brain filled with thoughts which may better be described as suspicions, desirous of nothing but of food, drink, and warmth.

An ambitious politician, or a general who refuses to lose his perquisites as such, himself imbued with the centuries-old dread of becoming one of the hungry, inarticulate masses, gathers about him all the soldiers he can recruit and find any means of keeping in his service.

Where now the proletariat fights for itself and represents its own interests we discern at first mere muttered, inarticulate sounds; and it takes long for these tones to rise to cries, for these cries to grow to general demands, and to become crystallized into programs.

He braced himself up, and with many long pauses, and many inarticulate attempts to set forth the facts in the least unfavorable aspect, told his story all through, in minute detail, to that hardest of all critics, his own dispossessed and disinherited boy.

He saw her eyes flash, and, though the brief dialogue which ensued was necessarily inarticulate to him, it was plain that she was laying her outraged feelings at the feet of her admirer, with a command for something summary and substantial by way of relief.

In a little while, it would have been impossible to breathe an atmosphere thus saturated with carbonic acid gas; and the superintendents can only watch the process of nature by listening outside the door to 'the inarticulate accents and indistinct rumblings' which proclaim a great metempsychosis.

Many introverted hackers who are next to inarticulate in person communicate with considerable fluency over the net, perhaps precisely because they can forget on an unconscious level that they are dealing with people and thus don't feel stressed and anxious as they would face to face.

In the laborious and inarticulate processes of her mind there gradually took form the knowledge that she would rather do any kind of work than pray; that she would rather, far rather, sit in idleness, looking out upon the familiar, beloved landscape, than pray.

With the happy ending of this trial, while Edith was surrounded by a group of officers and receiving their congratulations, a young Indian forced his way through the circle, gave one searching look at the girl's face, and with an almost inarticulate cry of "Edith!"

It may be considered an evidence of some Pantheistic quality in his previous education, that he seems to recognize a fellowship even in inarticulate objects; he has been known to verbally address plants, flowers, and fruit, and to extend his confidence to such inanimate objects as chairs and tables.

In inarticulate and trembling grief, the poor fellow watched the slow return of life; and many a swarthy face worked with emotion, when they heard his joyful exclamation, as the blood returned to her cheek, and her eyes opened on her father, mother, and brother.

She lay on her bed for hours together moving her restless head to and fro, muttering inarticulate words, then pouring forth a stream of vague discourse, through which there gleamed occasionally a ray of meaning, a wild sudden demand, a flash of protest and expostulation.

A critic, whose democracy is too narrowly partisan, complains that in "War and Peace" all the important characters are aristocrats, and that the story fails to reveal the motives of the people, of those inarticulate millions who Tolstoy himself says are the real makers of history.

For proof to bolster up my diagnosis I can only add that on three subsequent occasions, when I saw American troops ferrying ashore at French ports, they behaved in identically this same fashion, becoming for a period to be measured by hours practically inarticulate and incredibly earnest.

While I was strangling her, I turned my head away for fear that I might be moved to pity, fixed my gaze upon a flower design on the carpet, and in order to hear nothing, neither her wailing nor rattling, I shrieked out inarticulate words, like a possessed one.

As he stood there, his eyes, by a natural process of inspiration, fell upon the fire that glowed and crackled in the grate; and with a sharp, inarticulate sound of satisfaction he strode forward to the hearth, knelt down, and prepared for his work of destruction.

In memory, it had remained a brilliant performance, one any editor would be pleased to jump at, and I was astonished to find it youthful and crude, inarticulate, inadequate not only to the subject itself but to my appreciation of the subject which at the time was unbounded.

All eyes were fastened on the young candidate, who, instead of showing a liking for any of the names proposed, made it very clear, though in an inarticulate way, that he could see no reason why, for a mere question of names, these hypochondriacs should bother him so much.

I supposed it to denote strange hunters, but calling "Ring" at a venture, the noble dog's large paws and grand head were in a moment on my saddle, and he greeted me with all those inarticulate but perfectly comprehensible noises with which dogs welcome their human friends.

The eyes of all now turned upon Houseman; and he, after twice vainly endeavoring to speak, for the words died inarticulate and choked within him, advancing a few steps, pointed towards a spot on which, the next moment, fell the concentrated light of every torch.

Olive seemed trying to concentrate her drowsy faculties, the indistinct muttering became painfully earnest, but the unhappy father, though he placed his ear to the lips of the sinking girl, could connect no meaning with the inarticulate sounds, until Mildred's greater calmness came to his help.

We shall trace that flight, because in law flight is the criminal's inarticulate confession, and because it happened in this case as it always happens, and always must happen, that in some moment of fear or of elation, or of fancied security, he, too, to others, confessed his guilty deeds.

I was but a few paces from her, when she made a spiteful sweep at my face with one of her talons that would have sadly marred me had I been reached, and then, bent and crouching, she slunk away sullenly, still snarling and muttering inarticulate sounds.

Bands of beggars, in relays, hooked themselves on to the carriage with hoarse inarticulate noises, with idiotic air, wry necks, and deformed bodies; the projecting sinews swelled the wrinkled skin, and, peeping through the rags and tatters, was seen the flesh, in color like a burned brick.

Let the mountains and the sunshine and the green fields chant an anthem, if they would; but for this solitary sea, with its inarticulate cry, surely all the pain and impatience of the world's six thousand years had gone down and found a voice in that.

The procession of history reaching far back into the obscurity of the forgotten or inarticulate past, is reflected, with all its movement, gold and color, in the limpid stream of design, that mirror-like, paints each passing phase for us, and illustrates each act in the drama.

His temper was good, his generosity royal, and his parts not defective: but his inarticulate loquacity and the levity of his conduct, unsupported by any countenance from the King, his brother, had conspired to place him but low in the estimation of his countrymen.

This was very fine as long as the baby could only coo or make little inarticulate sounds, but that will of her own, which from the earliest minutes of her existence Maggie had manifested, came fully into play as soon as she found the full use of her tongue.

The moment I had dreamed of had come, and the eyes of the girl were turned expectantly upon me, and then, fool that I was, any readiness of wit I had, oozed through the soles of my feet and left me standing in the adorable presence, an inarticulate dolt.

While we were waiting to remount our railway trucks, a team of forty-eight bullocks passed, dragging one enormous log of twenty tons weight, the drivers cracking their long whips, screaming and leaping into the air in a frenzy of inarticulate excitement that somehow conveyed a meaning to the bullocks.

I could only occasionally discern his meaning as it flashed along; but a solemn, rapturous murmur of inarticulate sounds swept over my soul, and prepared it to receive with devout faith and respect, what else might have appeared to me a silly tale of truth and constancy and passionate devotion.

She would have done violence to herself, even, sooner than acknowledge in her heart that she was not at peace; but still there was a fever in her blood, making her restless, and eager to be doing, and drown an inarticulate yearning for something she would not name.

I immediately cast my eyes toward the cleared ground, from which I was but at a small distance, in order to see whether it was not occasioned by a sudden shower; when at that instant a sound resembling a deep rough voice, uttered, as I thought, a few inarticulate monosyllables.

She had heard of persons who acquired Spanish at ninety, or who experienced a passionate personal infatuation for the first time at sixty, but never of an adult creature, devoted to an indoor existence, who suddenly felt in middle age a real response to the great inarticulate voices of the earth.

Have you ever seen early in the morning when people sit around the breakfast table, a cleanly dressed man, with wrapping paper and cord under his arms, walking in the roadway, looking up at the windows of private houses and ejaculating every five or ten paces some inarticulate noises?

I was at that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the wayside, crushed, bleeding, lifeless; but now, bursting from the deadly bands that bound them, my ideas float on winged words, and as they expand their plumes, catch the golden light of other years.

Sally felt that she was in a spell woven of the beauty and breathlessness of the night and of her inarticulate joy as, still without speaking, David took off his coat and spread it upon the ground that sloped gently from the sturdy trunk of an oak tree.

The inarticulate sound of the voice is the scream of pain or the shout of joy, mutually intelligible to all human hearts; and this aerial basis of language continues to be more or less intelligible to all souls, when modulated as in poetry into melody and rhythm by emotion and character.

A hoarse, inarticulate sound came from his gaping mouth, and then issued the words that his mind had created unknown to him while he knelt, but now were uttered in a purely physical release from the throat that had held them back through a period of utter unconsciousness.

Somewhere, high up in the air, unheralded, invisible, there were passing some thin inarticulate sounds, far above the tops of the tallest smoke spires, as though some Titan blew a far jest across the continent to another near the sea, who answered with a gusty laugh, sardonic, grim, foreknowing.

Madison Wayne suddenly dashed forward and seized it, with a wild, inarticulate cry; staggered, fell over the chair, rose to his feet, blindly groped his way down the staircase, burst into the road, and, hugging the pouch to his bosom, fled like a madman down the hill.

Jinx muttered something inarticulate and furious, and for a fat man he made quick time across the hall and out into the street, where he climbed with a heavy heart into the great roadster, which he had fondly hoped might also carry Sunny with him upon a prolonged honeymoon.

He watched the crowd of friends wildly waving handkerchiefs; but he watched, above all, with a long, long gaze of inarticulate grief, a dark turbaned figure, that stood conspicuously apart, with a small white object in his arms: watched almost breathlessly, till it faded away into one general blur.

He was at least a head shorter than his adversary, but his grasp was like iron; and in spite of appearances, great Fritz proved but a weak and nerveless body, and greatly surprised at this unexpected attack, he could only open his large mouth and utter some inarticulate sounds.

Then the inarticulate, irregular outcries took upon themselves a measured rhythm, the movement of the mass formed itself upon the monotonous chant, the intervals grew shorter, the mule broke into a trot, and then the whole vast multitude fell into a weird, rhythmical, jogging quick step at her side.

We feel ourselves laden with an infinite burden; and what delights us most and seems to us to come nearest to the ideal is not what embodies any one possible form, but that which, by embodying none, suggests many, and stirs the mass of our inarticulate imagination with a pervasive thrill.

The passionate cry of a crowd thirsting for revenge rose again and again, as if from a giant's lungs, until the cheers and yells of "down" turned into a wild, deafening, inarticulate howl which was echoed and re-echoed a thousand times by the tall buildings on both sides of the avenue.

While, therefore, those parts of the parable which lay within our sphere were direct and literal, the latter portion, lying beyond our sphere, is necessarily indirect and expressed by signs: consequently, though sufficiently precise in its larger leading features, it is, in its minor details, indistinct, inarticulate.

The horror stirred by these accounts in the heart of the little woman, to say nothing of the terror, seemed oddly exaggerated to the daughter, who, with her eyes large and gleaming with fun, described the manner in which she left her unrestrained admirers flat and inarticulate.

Then the harsh voice of Markham was heard pouring out orders, loud, but almost inarticulate with rage and drunkenness; while, regardless of his awful situation, with fearful blasphemy he imprecated curses on the negligence which had caused the accident, and on the tardiness of action among his insubordinate crew.

Though a lingering doubt hovered in the minds of those who had witnessed the scene, some kept silent through fear, others whose brains were befuddled by the fumes of the wine gave utterance to inarticulate sounds, from which the view they took of the matter, was not entirely clear.

He made way for Kelsey to enter, and asked him a question, almost inarticulate because of the apples, but apparently of hospitable intent, for Kelsey said he had had a bite and a sup at Jonas Trice's, and did not want the supper which had been providently saved for him.

Here and there a young soldier leaned against a garden paling to talk to a girl among the hollyhocks, or an older soldier initiated a group of children into some mystery of military housekeeping; and everywhere were the same signs of friendly inarticulate understanding with the owners of the fields and gardens.

It becomes prosaic and inarticulate when forced to begin its day at four in the morning by reaching blindly, dazedly, for limp and obscure garments dangling from bedpost or chair, and to end that day at nine, numb and sodden with weariness, after seventeen hours of physical labor.

Then came an irregular rush forward, inarticulate cries pierced the air, war weapons were dashed clanging upon the earthen floor, while numerous torches, grasped from off the sacred altar, were waved aloft by excited hands, all serving to form as demoniacal a scene as was ever witnessed this side of hell.

Uttering fierce, inarticulate cries, partly of anguish and partly of defiance, he threw it open, and stepped forward to descend, when he was met at the head of the stairs by the band of assassins hurrying up, with drawn swords and blazing torches, to their work of pillage and death.

And although the point is one utterly inadmissible upon an empty stomach, although it is indeed a glaring falsity, everybody at once feverishly endorses it, either with shrill articulate cries, or with deep inarticulate booming, or with noises produced by the shock of flesh on flesh, or ivory on wood, or steel on crystal.

They would wander about, led by the inarticulate cries of a few naturally dominant individuals, drowning themselves, as thirst came on, in hundreds at the riverside landing places, looting those shops where the smell of decaying food attracted them, and perhaps at the end stumbling on the expedient of cannibalism.

They put them almost within his reach, to see his useless efforts, his trembling clutches at them, the piteous appeal of his whole nature, of his eyes, of his mouth and of his nose as he smelt them, and he slobbered onto his table napkin with eagerness, while uttering inarticulate grunts.

They put them almost within his reach, to see his useless efforts, his trembling clutches at them, the piteous appeal of his whole nature, of his eyes, of his mouth and of his nose as he smelt them, and he slobbered on his table napkin with eagerness, while uttering inarticulate grunts.

At about eleven o'clock, just as the discussion had reached this secondary stage, where new particulars were necessary, a youth, pale and breathless, with his right hand convulsively clasping his bloody shoulder, rushed into the central drug store and fell to the floor with inarticulate cries of fear and pain.