How to Use bestiary in a Sentence

bestiary

noun
  • The great bestiaries, from Herodotus to Audubon, are all embellished.
    — Kevin Conley, Town & Country, 2012-12-09
  • The one-eyed humans and Sciopods with umbrella feet, the whole exotic bestiary.
    — Tishani Doshi, The New York Review of Books, 2021-03-25
  • Though his catalogue of catastrophe is real, what one most remembers are the beasts in his bestiary.
    — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 2023-02-20
  • Medieval bestiaries were books that served as compendiums of creatures both fantastic and real.
    — Los Angeles Times, 2019-08-01
  • Medieval bestiaries were books that served as compendiums of creatures both fantastic and real.
    — Carolina A. Miranda, latimes.com, 2019-07-11
  • Kingdom Animalia is a sprawling, modern-day take on the medieval bestiary.
    — Courant Community, 2017-09-18
  • These oddities—and undoubtedly many others theorists have yet to even dream of—fill out our universe’s bizarre stellar bestiary.
    — Yasemin Saplakoglu, Scientific American, 2018-03-08
  • These demons are magical creatures inspired by world mythologies, not unlike Rowling’s own bestiary of fantastic beasts.
    — Constance Grady, Vox, 2018-08-31
  • The most common beings in her bestiary are a variety of mer-creatures, ranging from the regal merlion (and cub) to the comical merchicken.
    — Washington Post, 2020-11-27
  • For the house’s third collaboration with the artists, Viard wanted Veilhan to recreate the apartment’s bestiary.
    — Allyson Portee, The Hollywood Reporter, 2023-01-25
  • The result is a wildly imaginative bestiary that transports its viewer to a different realm, offering a welcome reprieve from our current one.
    — New York Times, 2021-02-25
  • This season made great use of new flying monsters, but at the same time the Upside-Down is a conceptual blank check to develop an entire bestiary of nightmare-inducing creatures.
    — Jeff Ewing, Forbes, 2022-07-01
  • Another image, from a 13th-century Franco-Flemish bestiary, shows a long-haired Samson prying open the jaws of a lion.
    — Edward Rothstein, WSJ, 2022-04-21
  • The Clickers – the most iconic creature / nightmare fuel from the bestiary – become exponentially more terrifying when their echolocation clicking feels like it’s brushing the hair of your neck.
    — Christopher Cruz, Rolling Stone, 2022-09-02
  • Here’s a bacterium whose genetic material includes genes from a diverse bestiary: Icelandic hyperthermophiles, petunias, yeast, perhaps a bit of bioluminescent jellyfish.
    — Sophia Roosth, Slate Magazine, 2017-04-25
  • Penned in the 12th century, the Aberdeen Bestiary’s entry for beavers exhibits the classic medieval bestiary components of observation, imagination and allegory.
    — Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Discover Magazine, 2013-11-19
  • And beyond these, the show’s bestiary of Main Street America, its hapless parents and inept leaders, its weird small businesses and petty local politics, its moral pretensions and amoral vanities do ring true, however exaggerated.
    — Jacob Bacharach, The New Republic, 2020-04-03

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