How to Use celibate in a Sentence

celibate

1 of 2 adjective
  • Bruin says he’s been celibate for two and a half years.
    — Jackson McHenry, Vulture, 3 June 2026
  • And celibacy, as Christ was celibate.
    — Khaleda Rahman, MSNBC Newsweek, 20 Aug. 2025
  • Lenny Kravitz has been celibate for almost a decade and Ice-T does not approve.
    — Lester Fabian Brathwaite, EW.com, 31 May 2024
  • Before ordination, there is the choice to marry or to be celibate.
    — Landon Mion, Fox News, 14 Mar. 2023
  • Catholic doctrine reserves the priesthood for men, and church tradition requires Latin rite priests to be celibate.
    — Washington Post, 4 June 2020
  • Demi Burnett is explaining her decision to remain celibate for the last two years.
    — Stephanie Wenger, Peoplemag, 7 Mar. 2024
  • Scores of German priests and monks have come out as celibate gay men, while some Catholic schools and churches have begun flying rainbow flags.
    — Kate Brady, Washington Post, 2 Oct. 2023
  • Grandparents with a monk son also had more grandchildren, as their non-celibate sons faced less or no competition with their brothers.
    — Ruth MacE and Alberto Micheletti, Ars Technica, 5 Sep. 2022
  • The members of the Heaven’s Gate cult were required to be celibate, and one of the goals of the cult was to eliminate gender.
    — Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 11 June 2026
  • An all-male, celibate hierarchy is making the rules, and there’s this chasm between what Catholics believe in practice and what the church is teaching.
    — Marc Ramirez, USA TODAY, 22 Apr. 2024
  • That's a weird question because first of all, there have always been people who are polygamous, and there have always been people who were celibate or asexual.
    — Gideon Lichfield, WIRED, 23 Aug. 2023
  • Sacks struggled with addiction, was celibate for decades, and suffered from his own neurological issues, all of which pulled him closer to his patients.
    — Dhruv Khullar, New Yorker, 27 Apr. 2025
  • The pair — who previously vowed to stay celibate out of respect to Mary’s grandparents — broke tradition by trying for a baby.
    — Stephanie Wenger, Peoplemag, 2 Oct. 2023
  • Voluntarily celibate women throughout history had mostly made that vow as one to God.
    — Hazlitt, 11 June 2025
  • Much has been made of the rise of incel culture (involuntarily celibate) but there’s a much broader and moderate feeling of alienation amongst young boys.
    — Kian Bakhtiari, Forbes.com, 24 June 2025
  • The couple — who is not married and had previously vowed to stay celibate out of respect of Mary’s grandparents — broke tradition by trying for a baby.
    — Kelly Wynne, Peoplemag, 19 Sep. 2023
  • An almost extinct celibate Christian sect is enjoying a 50 percent increase in its numbers—going from two members to three.
    — Khaleda Rahman, MSNBC Newsweek, 20 Aug. 2025
  • This will require you to practice vulnerability by vocalizing your decision to be celibate.
    — Dominique Fluker, Essence, 17 Apr. 2024
  • The couple — who got married during last week's episode but had previously vowed to stay celibate out of respect for Mary’s grandparents — broke tradition by trying for a baby.
    — Hannah Sacks, Peoplemag, 30 Nov. 2023
  • There's a global 4B movement encouraging women to go celibate in protest against shrinking rights and persistent misogyny.
    — Lydia Patrick, MSNBC Newsweek, 30 May 2025
  • And Shakers are celibate – one of the practices that most startled their neighbors in 18th- and 19th-century America.
    — Christian Goodwillie, The Conversation, 22 Dec. 2025
  • The history of celibate women, for instance, turned out to be overwhelmingly populated by religiously devout women.
    — Hazlitt, 11 June 2025
  • The town was in decline as a center of the wool trade but alive with the mayhem of some fifteen hundred young men—loosely supervised, theoretically celibate, armed with crossbows—the scholars of the university.
    — Sam Knight, The New Yorker, 12 Mar. 2024
  • In 1807, the Harmonists took a vow to remain celibate, which required them to build more community houses as the number of unwed society members grew.
    — Domenica Bongiovanni, IndyStar, 30 Dec. 2025
  • This — along with the unusual premise of celibate ascetics taking on the challenge of worldly romance — has given the Buddhist version its own viral fame, which the foundation hoped to maximize by opening it to the press.
    — Max Kim, Los Angeles Times, 22 Apr. 2024
  • This memoir describes the period of time that its author, a glamorous French fashion-magazine editor, spent voluntarily celibate in her late 20s.
    — Melissa Febos, The Atlantic, 9 June 2025
  • Supporters of Sabarimala’s ban argue that no other Ayyappan temple restricts women’s access because nowhere else does Ayyappan appear in his celibate ascetic form.
    — Deepa Das Acevedo, Foreign Affairs, 4 Apr. 2019
  • For many traditionalists, effective enforcement of this teaching would mean cracking down on homosexuality among the clergy, including gay clergy who are celibate and chaste.
    — Massimo Faggioli, Foreign Affairs, 11 Oct. 2018
  • An 86-year-old woman from Manhattan, New York, has gained viral attention after sharing the story behind her decision to remain single, and celibate, for over four decades.
    — Thomas G. Moukawsher, Newsweek, 17 Dec. 2024
  • As if women didn’t already have enough reason to fear men, the rise of the incel (involuntarily celibate) movement surely represents one of the most disheartening and dangerous subcultures to have sprung from the internet’s rotten skull.
    — Chris Wheatley, Longreads, 6 June 2024

celibate

2 of 2 noun
  • An almost extinct celibate Christian sect is enjoying a 50 percent increase in its numbers—going from two members to three.
    — Khaleda Rahman, MSNBC Newsweek, 20 Aug. 2025
  • Ex-members claim that Amy and Castillo would control their food intake and sleep schedule, and most members were expected to live celibate lives free of romantic relationships.
    — Christopher Moyer, Rolling Stone, 26 Nov. 2021
  • While the audience was instantly compelled by her newscaster cadence, pearl clutching, and disastrous, celibate relationship, her fellow Housewives thought it was all put on for the cameras.
    — Tom Smyth, Vulture, 14 Nov. 2025
  • But this ostensibly confirmed celibate oozes a gentle, undeniable sensuality.
    — Ben Brantley, New York Times, 13 Oct. 2016
  • The trailer is riveting and unsettling – just as the celibate Shakers were to the average observer during their American emergence in the 1780s.
    — Christian Goodwillie, The Conversation, 22 Dec. 2025

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