How to Use charnel in a Sentence

charnel

noun
  • In the vicarage garden, the bodies in the charnel mound have gone back to sleep.
    — Joshua Levine, Smithsonian Magazine, 30 Mar. 2022
  • What lay on the pillow was a charnel-house, a heap of pus and blood, a shovelful of putrid flesh.
    — Namwali Serpell, The New York Review of Books, 6 July 2022
  • Museum collections may look like a creepy charnel house to outsiders, full of corpses, pins, and mothballs.
    — Gwen Pearson, WIRED, 24 Sep. 2015
  • The senseless charnel houses of Verdun and the Somme found their match in Bakhmut.
    — Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, 14 Aug. 2023
  • Isotope dating studies of the bodies in the vicarage charnel mound found wide disparities.
    — Joshua Levine, Smithsonian Magazine, 30 Mar. 2022
  • Though cremation has since solved the burial space issue, Hallstatt townspeople can choose to send their remains to the charnel house.
    — Danielle Page, National Geographic, 4 Nov. 2019
  • This is the future of capitalism and its hollow promise of prosperity on planet Earth, a charnel house of our own making.
    — Washington Post, 19 Dec. 2019
  • For all the talk of internationalist duty, the Afghanistan that the Soviets left behind was a charnel ground.
    — Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker, 1 Sep. 2021
  • Down the row, past the typical stacks of bones and skulls found in charnel houses, the body of a woman was so well preserved that her nose still protruded outward from her face, some three hundred years after her death.
    — Caitlin Doughty, Time, 4 Oct. 2017
  • If Dickens’s body of work is a virtual charnel house, Jane Austen is famous for never killing off a single major character.
    — Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic, 16 Sep. 2020
  • Blood and wreckage was distributed over the entire ship, the after cabin and the vicinity of the ship adjacent to the exploded boiler resembling a charnel house.
    — San Diego Union-Tribune, 21 July 2019
  • Similar charnel houses were created in Catholic cemeteries all across Europe.
    — Jennifer Billock, Smithsonian, 15 Sep. 2017
  • An honorable soldier, Lee is an apt symbol for the Confederate rank and file whose sacrifices in the war’s charnel house shouldn’t be flushed down the memory hole.
    — Rich Lowry, National Review, 15 Aug. 2017
  • There’s a reason Buddhist monks meditate on charnel grounds, and why Cicero said the contemplation of death was the beginning of philosophy.
    — Parul Sehgal, New York Times, 26 June 2018
  • Syrian butcher Bashar al-Assad, a key Iranian client, might be brought in from the cold and deemed a legitimate actor, twelve years into his run atop the largest charnel house in the world.
    — The Editors, National Review, 13 Mar. 2023
  • Connecting the Alps and the Adriatic, this hiking trail showcases the heritage of the Isonzo Front, including fortifications, military cemeteries and charnel houses, alongside the region’s stunning natural scenery.
    — Washington Post, 27 Nov. 2019

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