How to Use acquiescent in a Sentence

acquiescent

adjective
  • The acquiescent girl became a strong assertive woman.
  • The young man’s comment was out of line, and my silence felt somehow acquiescent.
    — Judith Martin, The Mercury News, 21 Sep. 2024
  • Still, a cutting-edge cutthroat novel cannot be merely an acquiescent doppelgänger.
    — Cynthia Ozick, New York Times, 25 Oct. 2017
  • To depose the son, the opposition had to undermine a fortress state to which many Syrians were loyal, or at least acquiescent.
    — Charles Glass, Harper's magazine, 10 Feb. 2019
  • Society expects brown women to be more acquiescent and passive, and perceives Black women as angry.
    — Pragya Agarwal, Scientific American, 24 June 2024
  • That amendment had been made a dead letter by Jim Crow state legislatures and an acquiescent Supreme Court.
    — Robert D. Bland, The Conversation, 3 Feb. 2026
  • That amendment had been made a dead letter by Jim Crow state legislatures and an acquiescent Supreme Court.
    — Robert D. Bland, The Conversation, 30 Apr. 2026
  • Her decision to, through her representation, depict the 28 players as acquiescent and gullible will only widen the gulf.
    — Michael McCann, SI.com, 23 July 2019
  • Where Chelsea’s domestic overseers have been largely acquiescent to their accounting ingenuity, the same can’t be said abroad.
    — Chris Weatherspoon, New York Times, 21 Apr. 2025
  • These are highly prized in the worker-bee slot, but not so great in the CEO slot, where this cluster can lead to a tendency to be submissive or acquiescent.
    — Neil Senturia, sandiegouniontribune.com, 2 Oct. 2017
  • While South Korea, Brazil and Australia have been more acquiescent, most of the world's major powers have rejected his demands.
    — Heather Long and Steven Mufson, chicagotribune.com, 2 June 2018
  • But its hyperlocal and acquiescent posture mutes public engagement and policy debate on India’s role as the world’s largest democracy.
    — Anjani Jain, Fortune, 23 Mar. 2022
  • Instead the Democrats and Leftists are quietly acquiescent as these children and their parents are openly attacked for the (different) colors of their skin.
    — Tim Huelskamp, National Review, 15 Oct. 2020
  • And Arena has been one of Emanuel's loudest critics on the largely acquiescent City Council, giving the mayor another reason not to come to his aid.
    — John Byrne, chicagotribune.com, 24 May 2017
  • Strict emotional regulation is maintained over these relationships, which include a long affair with a married woman whose husband is affably acquiescent.
    — Tim Parks, The New York Review of Books, 24 June 2020
  • Critics described the overhaul as a scheme by the Board of Selectmen’s Republican majority to shape a library with more conservative and acquiescent leaders.
    — Alison Cross, Hartford Courant, 5 Feb. 2024
  • Israeli and Palestinian observers pointed to the acquiescent role played by the local Israel Defense Forces in essentially turning the other way as the settlers went on the rampage.
    — Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, 27 Feb. 2023
  • Teachers unions, which have emerged as a powerful force of opposition to school reopenings in the United States, have generally been more acquiescent in Europe, pushing for safety measures rather than closures.
    — Michael Birnbaum, Anchorage Daily News, 2 Dec. 2020
  • To wit, Ruth starts off as such an inexplicably monstrous figure — cursing, growling, demanding, hurling highball glasses at Sam’s head (and wounding him) — that her switch to more acquiescent soul-searcher feels like an impossible leap.
    — Gary Goldstein, Los Angeles Times, 23 Feb. 2023
  • While antigovernment sentiment remains strong and protesters’ demands have widened, the outbreak has cut across political lines in Hong Kong, which has grappled with seven months of pushback against a government viewed as too acquiescent to Beijing.
    — Joyu Wang, WSJ, 31 Jan. 2020
  • Netanyahu appears convinced that his country’s security, along with his own political survival, depends on prolonging the military offensives and keeping both Gaza and Lebanon ungovernable, and therefore acquiescent.
    — Mohanad Hage Ali, Foreign Affairs, 1 Nov. 2024
  • The fact that Raniere collected kompromat from DOS members strongly suggests that his psychological coercion techniques were not, by themselves, sufficient to keep women acquiescent.
    — Zoë Heller, The New Yorker, 5 July 2021
  • Trump is the most corrupt and scandal-plagued president since Nixon; indeed, his fiascoes eclipse Nixon’s, but many of them remain mostly or somewhat hidden, thanks in part to a much more acquiescent Republican Congress than the one Nixon had.
    — David A. Graham, The Atlantic, 8 Apr. 2026
  • Israel’s entrenched system of control over the Palestinian territories and its creeping annexation of Palestinian lands, unchecked for years by an acquiescent United States, may only provoke more angry resistance.
    — Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, 21 May 2021
  • Trent Lott, the Republican majority leader, summarily fired Dove and substituted a more acquiescent replacement, and the administration’s agenda proceeded on track.
    — Andrew Cockburn, Harper's Magazine, 20 Jan. 2021
  • With This is Gavin Newsom, the California governor is obviously working to position himself as some sort of aisle-bridging but Trump-antagonizing candidate, an acquiescent project that involves booking Steve Bannon one week and Ezra Klein the next.
    — Nicholas Quah, Vulture, 8 Dec. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'acquiescent.' 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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