How to Use allusive in a Sentence

allusive

adjective
  • Style often allowed a filmmaker to set a mood in an allusive way.
    — Hazlitt, 9 Aug. 2023
  • Aside from the text on that bottle, O’Brien’s work is allusive and indirect.
    — Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, 21 July 2023
  • Yet its true reward is the pleasure of discovery—that of unearthing the treasure that is her art’s allusive brilliance.
    — Lance Esplund, WSJ, 25 Dec. 2021
  • Some are allusive, like the way Sang-won has acquired Ui-ju’s habit of spicing up instant ramen with chilli paste.
    — Jessica Kiang, Variety, 11 Oct. 2023
  • Yarvin tends to extreme digression, while Land speaks with the allusive compression of a guru.
    — James Duesterberg, New Yorker, 18 Feb. 2026
  • All of his best work is allusive, steeped in research and context, materially creative, humane.
    — Michael Kimmelman, New York Times, 15 Feb. 2023
  • Ray Johnson, a master of the collage, made work that was cryptic, obsessive, and densely allusive.
    — Vince Aletti, The New Yorker, 22 July 2022
  • David Bowie, charming in interviews, and leaning toward the abstract and allusive in his lyrics, was not given to weighing in on news events.
    — Alexander Larman, Washington Post, 8 Jan. 2026
  • While the new film has Zeena making advances on Stan, the 1947 adaptation had to be more allusive.
    — Ben Kenigsberg, New York Times, 19 Dec. 2021
  • Most allusive is the album’s cover, which depicts a crude, disquieting patchwork of clip-art rainbows, black mushrooms and a coffin.
    — Nathan Rizzo | For The Oregonian/oregonlive, oregonlive, 29 July 2021
  • In sharply detailed yet allusive abstractions, Hall turns the Harlem of the nineteen-twenties into a stage of grand philosophical tragedy.
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 9 Nov. 2021
  • Every moment had its music, and many of those moments were as much allusive as illustrative, with old pop songs momentarily summoned to accent the action.
    — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 21 Dec. 2020
  • Nottage has cut perhaps half of her play to make room for Gordon’s music, and in doing so has made the smart if painful choice to retain only what is most narrowly tailored to the plot and yet most allusive.
    — Jesse Green, New York Times, 31 Jan. 2022
  • Every two-color page shows off some new and unexpected layout or brush technique — there are cutaways and maps and mythical creatures and beautiful, allusive drawings of tigers and flames.
    — Sam Thielman, New York Times, 29 Apr. 2025
  • This process involves unmarked quotation and complex, allusive use of rhyme, meter, and linguistic register, all of which make her poetry extremely hard to translate.
    — Sophie Pinkham, Harper's Magazine, 25 May 2021
  • The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.
    — René Ostberg, Encyclopedia Britannica, 18 June 2026
  • At times sparse and allusive, Moon’s poems use blank space and other stylistic considerations to convey a voice and thought that ranges from the contemplative to the surreal and absurd.
    — Literary Hub, 10 Nov. 2025
  • Where An Orange Colored Day was gestural and allusive, A Rush to Nowhere is direct.
    — Stephen Kearse, Pitchfork, 11 Mar. 2026
  • Their plots were complex, nested, allusive, the sort of TV that demanded activity and attention rather than passivity.
    — Phillip MacIak, The New Republic, 24 Aug. 2023
  • Human cruelty toward these animals forms a strong undercurrent in this richly allusive but sometimes frustratingly oblique account.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 26 Sep. 2021
  • Yet there’s an underlying emotional pathology that, in the allusive and time-fractured action, appears at the root of the catastrophe—an affective breakdown with comfort and luxury at the root.
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 7 Aug. 2020
  • Before long, in his typically allusive and impish style, Hoare has unfurled a whole tapestry of lives connected, however loosely, to Dürer’s work and its themes.
    — Washington Post, 30 Apr. 2021
  • The novelist's allusive account contrasts her lonely rowboat ride with the sumptuous Nile journeys made by Flaubert and Florence Nightingale.
    — Cnt Editors, Condé Nast Traveler, 16 June 2022
  • And indeed, the riches of the Afrikaans language are on display in this sensitive, witty, and allusive rendering of Beckett’s European classic.
    — The Editors, JSTOR Daily, 10 July 2025
  • The Hemingway style -- clipped, allusive, laconic and hard-boiled -- helped give American writing its rhythm and tone as much as blues and jazz helped give American music its global identity.
    — Gene Seymour, CNN, 13 Apr. 2021
  • The term is appropriately open-ended, since the participants devise pieces that are minimalist and mysteriously allusive.
    — Washington Post, 10 Sep. 2021
  • The Second Violin Concerto is in four movements, each with an allusive title, another evocative common trait in Williams’ concert pieces.
    — Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times, 28 Sep. 2022
  • Roger Zelazny burst onto the science fiction scene in the 1960s with a series of ground-breaking stories that combined a pulp sensibility with allusive, pyrotechnic prose.
    — Geek's Guide To The Galaxy, WIRED, 21 May 2021
  • As a former foreign correspondent, Fenton has had experiences similar to my own, but poetry provides a more allusive, emotional language than journalism.
    — The Week Uk, theweek, 11 Oct. 2024
  • But the dramatic scenarios, intended to be surreal, were instead generic, built out of familiar ideas from horror films, skillfully recycled and reproduced but not allusive in any illuminating way.
    — Brian Seibert, New York Times, 27 Sep. 2020

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