How to Use bestial in a Sentence

bestial

adjective
  • The bestial prelude to love comes in many (weird, wild, even mildly horrifying) forms.
    — Cody Cottier, Discover Magazine, 13 Mar. 2024
  • Black Adam was never going to be the role in which Johnson reclaimed his bestial side.
    — Lauren Michele Jackson, The New Yorker, 29 Oct. 2022
  • Last week, two beautiful young lives were destroyed in a moment of bestial violence.
    — Christine M. Flowers, Philly.com, 10 May 2018
  • What do digital animals, these bestial avatars, make possible?
    — Cynthia Chris, The Conversation, 19 Feb. 2026
  • Pain was also inflicted on the dog deliberately during these bestial acts.
    — Kc Baker, People.com, 4 Mar. 2025
  • The rape/bestial fetish is framed as a fantasy imagined by a woman, curiously beginning as an assault.
    — Nicholas Bell, SPIN, 31 July 2024
  • While her passion for her husband is tame, her screams for Dickinson’s character are bestial and overwhelming.
    — Harrison Richlin, IndieWire, 7 Dec. 2024
  • Neither one of these people appears to be enjoying themselves, but the woman soon begins to grunt with the bestial upset of a werewolf under a full moon.
    — David Ehrlich, IndieWire, 18 May 2026
  • The streaks provide proof of our mundane bestial reality—our hormones, our lunch, our particular whorls and spirals.
    — Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker, 1 Sep. 2021
  • Some distance between the source and the story would have benefited the themes at play, which end up buried beneath punches, slurs and bestial masculinity.
    — Carlos Aguilar, Los Angeles Times, 23 Oct. 2019
  • Some singers get up in front of audiences and attack sets with bestial ferocity before partying all night long, but that approach has an expiration date.
    — Nathan Grayson, Washington Post, 9 Aug. 2022
  • Such epiphanies, though bookended in Wright's novel between the bestial horrors of its first section and the abject bleakness of its third, are what give the novel its lasting glow.
    — Gene Seymour, CNN, 26 May 2021
  • Bodily fluids — bestial and human — stain the screen, punctuating a story that’s as much about rediscovering place as finding love.
    — Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times, 24 Oct. 2017
  • Vaccination was also bestial, because humans were being poisoned with disgusting stuff from an animal.
    — The Economist, 30 Aug. 2019
  • Rodin’s Crouching Woman, paired in the exhibit with Claudel’s later work of the same name, is locked in an unlikely, bestial position.
    — Farah Peterson, The Atlantic, 14 Dec. 2023
  • Lincoln’s opponents tarred him with racist and bestial characterizations.
    — Calvin Schermerhorn, The Conversation, 6 Aug. 2020
  • Some deep bestial neurological structures fired inappropriately and stoked within her an instinct of brute survival.
    — Mary Ann Grossmann, Twin Cities, 11 Jan. 2026
  • Our reduced olfactory apparatus was the detritus of a bestial and benighted past, and an allegory of our enlightenment.
    — Scott Sayare, Harper's Magazine, 23 Nov. 2021
  • Without relying on makeup or costuming, DeCaro’s extended transformation is a comedic tour de force as Gene becomes more and more bestial.
    — Sam Hurwitt, The Mercury News, 6 June 2019
  • Animal Poison Control is this awesome 24-hour hotline manned by health experts who specialize in bestial ingestion of unusual items.
    — Lisa Katayama, WIRED, 23 Feb. 2007
  • Eggers certainly loves the guy, and Skarsgård’s ultra-committed performance allows the film to enjoy a contagious pleasure in returning the vampire archetype to its more bestial origins.
    — David Ehrlich, IndieWire, 2 Dec. 2024
  • Pent-up emotions, regrets, and bestial longings all burst forth in an expansive baritone whose confident quietism distinguishes him from other wispier alt-centric brooders like Daniel Caesar.
    — Will Dukes, Rolling Stone, 25 Apr. 2025
  • The sparseness of the fossil record has confounded attempts to understand the ways that prehistoric mammals gave birth and brought up their babies, leaving significant gaps in our understanding of our broader bestial family’s history.
    — Riley Black, Smithsonian Magazine, 26 Oct. 2022
  • Abolitionists claimed that the eloquence of slaves and Africans proved their equal humanity, but most Europeans had long taken for granted that black utterances were inherently inferior, even bestial.
    — Fara Dabhoiwala, The New York Review of Books, 3 Aug. 2020
  • Movies tend to anthropomorphize their dogs by projecting recognizably human qualities onto them, but Bob Peterson and Pete Docter’s script embraces the less bestial parts of being an animal.
    — Charles Bramesco, Vulture, 5 Feb. 2024
  • Preachers began to tell anecdotes about deceitful Jewish misers who consorted with the devil; artists began to visualize such tales in grotesque and frightening detail, endowing their Jewish villains with distinctively fleshy and bestial features.
    — Sara Lipton, The New York Review of Books, 17 June 2019
  • Those who believe Israelis and Jews capable of such an outrage might feel justified in wishing that such bestial monsters were wiped from the Earth—a shift from disgust to dehumanization to possible destruction that is well charted by social psychologists.
    — David Frum, The Atlantic, 21 May 2026

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