How to Use shibboleth in a Sentence

shibboleth

noun
Definition of shibbolethnext
Synonyms for shibbolethnext
  • She repeated the old shibboleth that time heals all wounds.
  • The Friday shibboleth remains today, but mainly when the day falls on the 13th of the month.
    — Melissa Holbrook Pierson, WSJ, 2 Jan. 2022
  • All those shibboleths have either been blown up or may yet be blown up in 2018.
    — Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 14 Dec. 2017
  • That sounds cliché, but then, GDC has never feared a little shibboleth.
    — Lauren Warnecke, chicagotribune.com, 2 Apr. 2022
  • There are still those would insist on the last answer, which has been a critical shibboleth for a very long time.
    — A.o. Scott, New York Times, 21 Feb. 2018
  • Spencer mocks these same abstractions as shibboleths of the modern age.
    — Graeme Wood, The Atlantic, 14 May 2017
  • These were the group’s shibboleths—a way of welcoming friends, and a warning to those intruding from without.
    — Jacob Brogan, Slate Magazine, 16 Oct. 2017
  • Positions on issues like gun control are shibboleths of some of our tribes.
    — New York Times, 16 May 2018
  • Soon enough, and without advertising at all, Slack was a perk, if not a shibboleth, for a certain kind of employee and a certain kind of company.
    — Ellen Cushing, The Atlantic, 12 Oct. 2021
  • There’s something of a secret password element to this, a shibboleth that not only marks users of a certain age and experience but unites them.
    — Laura Hudson, The Verge, 19 Oct. 2018
  • But Daniel Johnnes, Dinex’s wine director, and four of his sommeliers mercifully held the line to five courses, each served with two wines (or a wine and a beer, in one case) meant to counter enduring shibboleths.
    — Eric Asimov, New York Times, 12 Oct. 2017
  • The ad was later changed slightly to fix the pronunciation of Pawtucket, a Rhode Island shibboleth.
    — Brian Amaral, BostonGlobe.com, 27 Sep. 2022
  • That phrase has become a presidential shibboleth, used by Mr. Trump to disparage news that’s unhelpful to him.
    — Tunku Varadarajan, WSJ, 6 Aug. 2018
  • History has repeatedly proved these shibboleths wrong, and even the American people no longer seem to buy them, but that hardly matters.
    — Alex Pareene, The New Republic, 10 Feb. 2020
  • In his speech, Guterres took aim at two Trump administration shibboleths: That the cause of global warming has yet to be established, and that efforts to fight it constitute a threat to the economy.
    — chicagotribune.com, 30 May 2017
  • These critiques of class-action lawsuits amount to a shibboleth among conservatives and big businesses.
    — Kenneth K. Lee, National Review, 2 Dec. 2019
  • The Partnership’s ad campaign hauls out the familiar shibboleths against healthcare reform.
    — Los Angeles Times, 1 Aug. 2019
  • Her mission was to make a beautiful, livable, and—most important—eco-friendly interior that bucked the tired shibboleth that green living isn’t pretty.
    — Charles Curkin, ELLE Decor, 30 Sep. 2022
  • Trump violated a dizzying number of shibboleths as a candidate and has tested norms of behavior during his first eight months in office.
    — James Hohmann, Washington Post, 12 Sep. 2017
  • The term has become a shibboleth, an immediate shorthand for Latter-day Saints to size up one another’s obedience and orthodoxy.
    — The Salt Lake Tribune, 13 Oct. 2021
  • Despite the irony of furious takedowns and defensiveness inspired by a show about treating people with respect, Ted Lasso has become a shibboleth of TV discourse.
    — Kathryn Vanarendonk, Vulture, 25 Aug. 2021
  • Saka has blown up that racist shibboleth by demonstrating an innate tactical knowledge.
    — Charlie Campbell, Time, 13 Oct. 2022
  • Relevance is one of the great shibboleths of criticism, and after a real-life event as dramatic and complex as this year’s election, the temptation to seek clues and answers in works of popular art is almost overwhelming.
    — Manohla Dargis, A. O. Scott and Stephen Holden, New York Times, 7 Dec. 2016
  • O’Neill has frequently been critical of the way that views on the right to die have neatly cleaved along class lines, with a pro-euthanasia stance becoming identified with upper-middle-class, progressive social shibboleths.
    — Tara Isabella Burton, Vox, 21 May 2018
  • And that ineffable quality of style makes articles by British or American writers distinct, even in the absence of obvious shibboleths.
    — The Economist, 20 July 2017
  • The show is now a shibboleth of public discourse here, a byword among ultra-conservatives who praise it as a patriotic exposé and reformists who denounce it as slanderous propaganda.
    — Omid Khazani and Henry Chu, Los Angeles Times, 18 Nov. 2021
  • That changed after China embarked on economic reforms four decades ago while the North stuck to orthodox communism's shibboleths of state ownership and central planning, even as its economy tanked and starvation grew.
    — Christopher Bodeen, Fox News, 20 June 2019
  • More than a few viewers have also noticed that its story line serves as a covert critique of some cherished shibboleths, especially the kind of everyone-gets-a-ribbon egalitarianism that post-boomer generations have grown up on.
    — Ann Hornaday, Washington Post, 23 Jan. 2020
  • Cow’s milk is appallingly resource-intensive to produce, and its reputation as a nutritional mainstay has eroded to near-shibboleth status.
    — Vogue, 15 Dec. 2017
  • Work rules for recipients of public assistance, like drug testing, are conservative shibboleths.
    — Michael Hiltzik, latimes.com, 18 Apr. 2018

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'shibboleth.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: