How to Use anguished in a Sentence

anguished

adjective
  • Fair enough, but please, spare us the anguished cri de poulet.
    — Charles P. Pierce, Esquire, 24 Oct. 2017
  • Ibrahim has one anguished question for me.
    — Janine Di Giovanni, Vanity Fair, 25 June 2026
  • Kids poured out their own anguished stories.
    — Jack Korngold, Rolling Stone, 28 Sep. 2025
  • Maybe that’s the feeling of brain cells dying a painful, anguished death.
    — Jake Coyle, Cincinnati.com, 21 June 2017
  • Okeadu slid to the ground with a thud, his head lolling strangely, with sharp, anguished sounds rising from his body.
    — ABC News, 30 June 2026
  • Some stations opened their call-in lines to anguished listeners.
    — Miami Herald Archives, Miami Herald, 20 May 2026
  • There is no question mark, as there seemed to be in King’s anguished voice 25 years ago.
    — Theresa Walker, Orange County Register, 30 Apr. 2017
  • The arrival of the monsoon next month is likely to be more help to anguished Kachins.
    — The Economist, 17 May 2018
  • There is the sound of anguished crying, and words that are unclear under the burden of pain.
    — Longreads, 3 Feb. 2026
  • The anguished ending is divisive, but god if Liu doesn’t sell it.
    — David Ehrlich, IndieWire, 14 Mar. 2025
  • The gunshots and anguished cries come from a video playing on McLeod’s phone.
    — Faith Karimi, CNN Money, 29 Aug. 2025
  • After a few days, Wendy passed away, with Sprague and her anguished mother at her side.
    — NBC News, 8 July 2019
  • Perfect those words were, though, in their specific content of anguished grief.
    — Hazlitt, 26 Nov. 2024
  • The long and anguished drives to states with laws not rooted in the 1800s will take the pounds right off.
    — Mary McNamara, The Mercury News, 15 May 2024
  • From one day to the next, the advice to remain sensible and not panic sounds more and more anguished.
    — Emmanuel Carrère, Harper’s Magazine , 25 May 2022
  • She was treated for long, anguished minutes as a hush fell over the crowd waiting far below at the finish line.
    — Andrew Dampf, Chicago Tribune, 8 Feb. 2026
  • She was treated for long, anguished minutes as a hush fell over the crowd waiting far below at the finish line.
    — Andrew Dampf, Arkansas Online, 9 Feb. 2026
  • That look — eyes wide open in anguished disbelief — has become so familiar of late.
    — Oliver Kay, The Athletic, 20 Dec. 2024
  • His icy, anguished eyes—though both are the same color—convey all the torment a misfit on Earth might feel.
    — Stephanie Zacharek, Time, 30 Aug. 2025
  • So, on the night after the murder, the town’s streets were filled with anguished cries from the Inuit—wails of loss and pain.
    — Literary Hub, 28 Oct. 2025
  • Where his folk recordings felt anguished and stormy, here the vocals are sonorous and slow, merging with mellow waves and pulses.
    — Hua Hsu, The New Yorker, 14 Sep. 2020
  • Deeply anguished to learn of the loss of lives due to the blast in the firecracker factory in Batala.
    — Sugam Pokharel and Swati Gupta, CNN, 5 Sep. 2019
  • That June is pregnant, and an anguished mother, only enhances her heroism in the eyes of the show.
    — Lisa Miller, The Cut, 2 May 2018
  • Its prizing of dharma, and duty as a form of virtue, gave Oppenheimer’s anguished mind a form of calm.
    — WIRED, 24 July 2023
  • Hence the insistence, now a tiresome cliché of the genre, on the self-doubts and anguished souls of their protagonists.
    — Michael Dirda, Washington Post, 8 Sep. 2023
  • The Bostock ruling arrived against a backdrop of anguished soul-searching on the right.
    — Mattathias Schwartz, New York Times, 15 Feb. 2025
  • But the anguished mother cursed the fairy for the loss of her sons, and her wails of despair echoed from mountaintop to mountaintop.
    — Literary Hub, 22 Oct. 2025
  • Ignore that unsettling sound in the distance—that's just the anguished wail of Friends devotees around the globe.
    — Emily Dixon, Marie Claire, 15 Oct. 2019
  • In Wolf’s case, his anguished tone reflects the scale of his own disillusionment.
    — Jennifer Szalai, New York Times, 15 Feb. 2023
  • Around the Bay Area, scores of home day-care centers and preschools are facing the same anguished decision.
    — Rachel Swan, SFChronicle.com, 8 May 2020

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