How to Use changeling in a Sentence

changeling

noun
  • The trows might steal you away and leave a changeling in your place.
    — Alex Ross, New Yorker, 24 Nov. 2025
  • Thirteen years later, the goblin world is in crisis and needs the changeling back.
    — oregonlive, 20 Oct. 2019
  • But as is so often the case, take a ho-hum little thing and put it in a garden and the ugly duckling does its changeling thing.
    — Paul Cappiello, The Courier-Journal, 18 Aug. 2017
  • Like a changeling—a motif that recurs throughout the novel—the old narrator has been taken and replaced by someone new.
    — Bekah Waalkes, The Atlantic, 25 Sep. 2025
  • But some sympathetic twitchy polymath would come along and explain that abductions happen all the time; this is what changelings always were.
    — Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review, 21 Dec. 2017
  • The young Joan—with her gift for painting, her passion for dancing, her bristling impatience with school rules, and her wanderlust—was more like a changeling.
    — Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, 29 Nov. 2020
  • In most stories, a changeling is a fairy child that replaces a human one, typically without the baby or the human parents knowing.
    — Tamara Fuentes, Seventeen, 25 Jan. 2021
  • The folktale of the changeling is here recontextualized into a modern setting.
    — Sheena Scott, Forbes, 18 June 2021
  • Nóra comes to believe that the child left in her care is not her grandson, but a changeling left behind by the fairies, or Good People, who cause illness and misfortune.
    — Patty Rhule, USA TODAY, 19 Sep. 2017
  • Superstition around fairies lingered in rural Ireland then, and Cleary recruited Bridget’s family to help drive out this mischief-making changeling.
    — Jenny Rogers, Washington Post, 26 Sep. 2019
  • These men and women sat in uncomfortable, beat-up school desks determined to learn English — such a difficult language to acquire with its changeling grammar rules and high-maintenance punctuation marks.
    — Sarah Fay, Longreads, 17 Mar. 2020
  • The imitations were clearly imitations, less like uncanny meat changelings and more like the Dionne Warwick impersonator at your friendly neighborhood drag bar.
    — Soleil Ho, SFChronicle.com, 11 Oct. 2019
  • Goslings and ducklings are baby birds, but a groundling is an uncritical or unrefined person (too poor to pay for a seat in Renaissance theaters) and a changeling is a child exchanged by fairies, or any kind of replacement of inferior value.
    — Melissa Mohr, The Christian Science Monitor, 28 June 2018
  • In rural 19th century Ireland, Nóra suspects that her toddler grandson, whose mother has died, is actually a changeling left by the fairies, or Good People, who cause illness and misfortune.
    — USA TODAY, 14 Oct. 2017

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