How to Use demotic in a Sentence

demotic

adjective
  • When literary fiction types lose touch with the demotic their books go bad.
    Literary Hub, 10 Dec. 2025
  • Some authors think that no book can succeed unless demotic and dumb.
    Felipe Fernández-Armesto, WSJ, 28 July 2017
  • All of them present a witch’s brew of demotic diversity and craven dishonesty.
    Armond White, National Review, 27 Sep. 2023
  • In truth, most of his pet objects look nostalgic only from our present vantage; in their day, his cheeseburgers and ice-cream desserts were demotic, slangy—a provocation.
    Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 21 July 2022
  • In England, Champollion's main rival in the race to decode the slab focused his efforts on the demotic section of the stone.
    Katie Hunt, CNN, 12 Oct. 2022
  • Instead, Baker does trash-and-vaudeville as in his demotic fashion ad Khaite FW21.
    Armond White, National Review, 29 Dec. 2021
  • The first was written in hieroglyphs and the second in the demotic script, a cursive form of ancient Egyptian similar in style to written Arabic.
    Benjamin Plackett, Discover Magazine, 28 Nov. 2022
  • That meant the demotic and hieroglyphic portions would be similar to the Greek text, and for the first time ever, scholars had a shot at understanding the mysterious symbols.
    Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi, Discover Magazine, 29 Dec. 2022
  • The fire, virtuosity and spiritual imagination with which Morgan conjures this weary, seen-it-all, demotic black prophet — like so much else in her book — are nothing short of genius.
    Jaimy Gordon, New York Times, 10 June 2016
  • Carved on the dark, granite-like stone were indecipherable hieroglyphics, the simplified Egyptian demotic script and ancient Greek.
    Ashley Strickland, CNN, 15 Oct. 2022
  • Alongside hieroglyphics, administrators and businessmen used the plain hieratic and demotic scripts to keep their secular world spinning.
    Cody Cottier, Discover Magazine, 18 Feb. 2022
  • The American right has been molded in his anti-elitist, grassroots, demotic, irreverent, patriotic, hard-charging image.
    Matthew Continetti, National Review, 8 Feb. 2020
  • But the words Perdita speaks, defending the aesthetics of the natural over the artificial and refined, could be applied as well to the ambitious use of demotic language, a practice that, at the time Shakespeare wrote, was still new.
    Marilynne Robinson, New Republic, 12 Dec. 2017
  • What does her embrace of the Republican base's most demotic superstitions tell us about the character of the contemporary right — and the character of contemporary American politics more generally?
    Damon Linker, The Week, 29 Mar. 2022

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