How to Use abbess in a Sentence
abbess
noun-
Hildegard was a Catholic abbess of the Benedictine Order.
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Literary Hub,
18 Mar. 2026
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That comes from a book on Hildegard of Bingen, who was an abbess in a monastery in Germany in the eleven-hundreds.
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Jane Hu,
The New Yorker,
30 Nov. 2021
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The heavy religious imagery suggests the anonymous woman was an early Christian leader, perhaps an abbess.
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Meilan Solly,
Smithsonian Magazine,
28 Dec. 2022
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The discovery of a document detailing the occult activities of an old abbess suddenly launches us on a grail quest.
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Merve Emre,
The New Yorker,
21 Dec. 2020
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Following Offa’s death in 796, Cynethryth joined a religious order and became abbess of the monastery.
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Livia Gershon,
Smithsonian Magazine,
21 Aug. 2021
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In 1151, Richardis was appointed the abbess of a convent far to the north, near Bremen, where her brother happened to be the archbishop.
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Alex Ross,
The New Yorker,
30 Jan. 2023
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The Anglo-Saxon bling suggested the woman was powerful in her own right and extremely devout, perhaps an early Christian leader, a princess or an abbess.
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Katie Hunt,
CNN,
6 Dec. 2022
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Behind Convent Walls, his ninth film and one of the breezier entries in his filmography, checks off all these boxes with a light-on-plot chronicle of naughty nuns and their abbess’s futile efforts to wrangle them.
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Elle Carroll,
Vulture,
6 Dec. 2021
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'abbess.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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