How to Use cotillion in a Sentence

cotillion

noun
  • The cotillion is all about push and pull, and tension and release.
    — Kathryn Lindsay, refinery29.com, 11 Feb. 2020
  • For many who grow up in the South, cotillion classes are a rite of passage.
    — Betsy Cribb, Southern Living, 15 Feb. 2018
  • For many who grow up in the South, cotillion classes are a rite of passage.
    — Betsy Cribb, Southern Living, 15 Feb. 2018
  • Send her to an SEC game, a crawfish boil, and maybe a cotillion.
    — Southern Living, 1 May 2017
  • Punk was fading, but club culture was rising, with parties like Blitz its cotillions.
    — Matthew Schneier, New York Times, 3 Mar. 2018
  • The scuffle occurred at a meeting of the local cotillion club, which promotes good manners.
    — Joseph Cranney, ProPublica, 27 Nov. 2019
  • The children of the Black bourgeoise have likely done etiquette training like cotillion.
    — Maya Richard-Craven, Forbes, 20 Feb. 2024
  • In lieu of a debutante cotillion or other social ritual, the coming-out of my hair would mark my transition from girl to teenager.
    — Michaela Angela Davis, The Atlantic, 5 Mar. 2022
  • The cotillion is the culmination of this program, which also includes fundraising for the charity of their choice.
    — Sue Strachan, NOLA.com, 5 Apr. 2018
  • But when that sportsmanship becomes too polite, too nice, too fretted over, then basketball can turn into a freaking cotillion, and who wants that?
    — Gordon Monson, The Salt Lake Tribune, 11 Dec. 2022
  • My husband narrowly escaped cotillion, which was somewhat of a tradition in his family.
    — Aj Willingham, AJC.com, 8 Apr. 2026
  • Also cotillion dresses in silver and emerald green and evening gowns encrusted in three-dimensional metallic blooms.
    — Vanessa Friedman, New York Times, 13 Feb. 2020
  • Others have to explain that cotillions are not the kind of grueling social warfare portrayed on Gossip Girl.
    — Bob Morris, Town & Country, 28 Nov. 2017
  • But the player who stayed for the Wimbledon ball, sure departed unfashionably early from this cotillion.
    — Jon Wertheim, SI.com, 1 Sep. 2019
  • At the end of the Ivy Rosettes Mentoring Program, the young women make their formal debut at a cotillion.
    — Najahe Sherman, CBS News, 3 Mar. 2026
  • Longer by an eighth-of-a-mile than the Pegasus, the Derby is the crowded debut cotillion of the nation’s finest 3-year-old debutantes.
    — Guy Martin, Forbes, 28 Jan. 2023
  • The Williams sisters were outsiders, in obvious ways — Black girls from the public courts of Compton, crashing a cotillion of a sport.
    — John Branch, New York Times, 4 Sep. 2022
  • For children, cotillion is another place where the manners and etiquette that Mama teaches at home can be publicly practiced and reinforced.
    — Betsy Cribb, Southern Living, 15 Feb. 2018
  • The show also has a cotillion episode planned for May and an unannounced Tony and Grammy Award-winning guest star set for an Easter episode.
    — Kennedy French, Variety, 20 Feb. 2026
  • This picture is one of a few taken at cotillion, a largely Southern tradition of etiquette classes and formal dance instruction for middle schoolers.
    — Rachel Monroe, New Yorker, 25 Oct. 2025
  • If the cotillion marks a formal transition into womanhood, King approaches that idea with both reverence and intention.
    — Essence, 1 Apr. 2026
  • Committee members of the cotillion and past alumni will host a social distance parade to crown the 2020 Miss Cotillion.
    — Briana Rice, Cincinnati.com, 1 May 2020
  • The execution scene, its appalling cruelty cloaked in ceremony, bears a grotesque resemblance to the presentation of debutantes at a cotillion ball.
    — Andrew Delbanco, The New York Review of Books, 27 Apr. 2021
  • However, when the time came around for her daughter’s debut in the cotillion, the mom and daughter decided to repurpose Keys-Randell’s wedding dress as a ballgown for the event.
    — Kimberlee Speakman, People.com, 10 Jan. 2025
  • White dresses are a must for baptisms/confirmation, cotillions, debutante balls, high school AND college graduations, and finally, weddings.
    — Hannah Norling, Southern Living, 11 July 2017
  • The heroine’s mother, Eunice ( Erica Gimpel ), presides over a Harlem finishing school that prepares proper little girls for cotillion.
    — Joe Morgenstern, WSJ, 23 Dec. 2020
  • Each required enough multiples to show different stages of destruction—something Daman had to do for Blair’s cotillion dress in the original Gossip Girl—which is no small feat for any costume department.
    — Tyler McCall, Harper's BAZAAR, 30 Nov. 2022
  • As Marsalis learned, Johnson had more than 200 compositions published, including cotillions, quadrilles, waltzes, reels, operatic airs, military marches and quicksteps.
    — Richard Grant, Smithsonian Magazine, 29 Mar. 2023
  • By the 1920s, Greek life had become a way for wealthy Southern belles like Zelda Fitzgerald to escape the restraints (literally and figuratively) of cotillion corsetry.
    — Faran Krentcil, Harper's BAZAAR, 2 Sep. 2021
  • Expanding on Harris’ short film of the same name, which was acquired by HBO Max following its festival run, Pure is a coming-of-age story set within the rarely depicted world of Black cotillion culture in suburban Maryland.
    — Matt Grobar, Deadline, 10 Apr. 2026

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