How to Use dilatory in a Sentence
dilatory
adjective-
This new, less dilatory mode doesn’t ask to be understood, but haunts us with a bleakly dead-on, diffident humor about the pain of being alive.
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Megan O’Grady,
New York Times,
10 May 2018
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These dilatory announcements fudged the core question of whether masks protect the wearer from others or others from the wearer.
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Ari Schulman,
The New Republic,
15 June 2020
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Ruders, a prolific composer with a dazzling musical mind, sometimes writes works whose expressive ends can seem dilatory and obscure.
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Russell Platt,
The New Yorker,
28 May 2017
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That was a corollary to the dilatory pursuit of war crimes prosecutions by a West German justice system that was riddled with lawyers and judges who were former Nazis.
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Alison Smale,
New York Times,
17 June 2016
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Fieseler also attends to a different kind of heroism — the painstaking slog of activism that has seen the fire commemorated in plaques and public days of mourning, the seeking of sympathy from a dilatory city and church.
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Parul Sehgal,
New York Times,
29 May 2018
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So Davies gets it right that government decisions, and industry’s dilatory response, have driven the development of EV technology.
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IEEE Spectrum,
29 Jan. 2016
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Even when progress is made—like 2017’s commitment to allow American credit cards into China—Beijing is dilatory on execution.
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Charlie Campbell,
Time,
7 May 2026
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Concurrently, under the Obama administration, the federal government was also dilatory in the extreme.
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WSJ,
10 Apr. 2020
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'dilatory.' 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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