How to Use city-state in a Sentence

city-state

noun
  • And the Asian city-state has won that accolade nine times in the last 11 years.
    — Stacey Leasca, Travel + Leisure, 7 Dec. 2023
  • Athens was a belligerent city-state that fell victim to its own aggressions.
    — Alex Ross, New Yorker, 15 June 2026
  • Just how the small city-state of less than 6 million people has come to be the preferred venue for top artists is no mystery.
    — Time, 22 June 2023
  • It was initially applied to the dominance of one city-state over others.
    — Andrew Latham, The Conversation, 30 May 2025
  • As conditions worsened, city-states fought over power and resources.
    — Lauren Mowery, Forbes.com, 26 May 2026
  • The mayor talked about the new level of city-state cooperation.
    — Alexa Herrera, CBS News, 8 Jan. 2026
  • The verdict carried a rare Vatican prison sentence in a city-state with only three jail cells.
    — Stefano Pitrelli, Washington Post, 23 Jan. 2024
  • On the tip of the Malaysian peninsula, the island city-state piled up sand to expand its coastline and reclaim land from the sea.
    — TIME, 10 Oct. 2023
  • Now the competitions that once united the fractured city-states of Greece connect people around the globe.
    — Miriam Kamil, JSTOR Daily, 20 Nov. 2024
  • Barbarians and city-states have merged into one concept, called independents.
    — Ars Technica, 3 Feb. 2025
  • The Corinthian style is named for Corinth, an ancient Greek city-state about 50 miles west of Athens.
    — Sonja Anderson, Smithsonian Magazine, 22 Jan. 2025
  • The issue is a critical one for the Southeast Asian city-state of 6 million people.
    — Chris Wellisz, semafor.com, 16 Apr. 2026
  • This city-state packs a world of experiences into its ever-changing skyline and sprawling gardens.
    — Bailey Berg, AFAR Media, 12 Feb. 2025
  • Historians have argued that similar helmets were worn by ancient warriors of many Greek city-states.
    — Sonja Anderson, Smithsonian Magazine, 22 Jan. 2025
  • Singapore’s imports look huge because that city-state is often the first stop on the way to their final destination in other parts of Asia.
    — Steve Forbes, Forbes.com, 27 May 2025
  • Hansen believes that wastefulness and despoilment sped the collapse of the vast city-states likely controlled by El Mirador.
    — Los Angeles Times, 1 Mar. 2023
  • The rivalries between Greek city-states led to the regular use of bribery to encourage shifts in loyalties and stoke rebellions.
    — Foreign Affairs, 14 Jan. 2025
  • For months, tensions had been building between the two city-states as the Athenians clashed with Sparta’s friends and the Spartans sat idly by.
    — A. Wess Mitchell, Foreign Affairs, 22 Apr. 2025
  • In his view, the fact that many Greek city-states had representative governments enabled the Greek victory.
    — Debbie Felton, The Conversation, 8 Aug. 2025
  • Adjusting to life in Singapore won’t be much of a hassle since many signs in the culturally diverse city-state are in English.
    — Ryan Hogg, Fortune Europe, 2 Oct. 2024
  • At the time, Italian city-states were wealthy, Bauch said, and had developed storage systems for grain and huge trade networks established over centuries.
    — Evan Bush, NBC news, 4 Dec. 2025
  • And where better than Monaco, the sovereign city-state home to F1’s most iconic Grand Prix, to unveil such pieces?
    — Paige Reddinger, Robb Report, 19 Oct. 2024
  • Some 550 years ago the last of the great city-states of the Maya civilization that had flourished in the Americas for centuries met their demise.
    — Zach Zorich, Scientific American, 1 Oct. 2020
  • With crops failing and fears of starvation rising, some wealthy Italian city-states like Florence and Venice imported grain from elsewhere in the world.
    — Evan Bush, NBC news, 4 Dec. 2025
  • Over the last decade, Singapore, a city-state with a population of five million, has quietly become an important partner in this regard.
    — Jude Blanchette, Foreign Affairs, 24 July 2023
  • Dozens of boreholes were drilled into the ground at the site, once a pre-Hispanic city-state, revealing layers of artifacts from various societies.
    — Brendan Rascius, Miami Herald, 4 Apr. 2024
  • The Doge was also, in medieval times, the chief magistrate of city-states such as Venice and Genoa, and acted as a judge to decide questions brought before a court of justice.
    — Jerrold Lundquist, Forbes, 6 Jan. 2025
  • Maria Montessori was born in the province of Ancona in 1870, as Italy was unified out of a patchwork of ancient republics and city-states.
    — Kathryn Hughes, The New York Review of Books, 16 Feb. 2023
  • The story of the Singapore’s Chinese migrant worker community dates back to before the existence of the modern-day city-state.
    — Isabelle Kliger, Forbes, 18 Mar. 2025
  • His route to Sparta would have taken him through Corinth, Nemea, and Arcadia and avoided kingdoms or city-states not allied with Athens.
    — Gitanjali Roy, Encyclopedia Britannica, 30 Mar. 2026

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