How to Use disempower in a Sentence

disempower

verb
  • They have been disempowered by a society that believes they are intellectually inferior.
  • And to heighten that rush, to bring home the sense of power, someone else needs to be disempowered.
    — Noah Berlatsky, The Verge, 18 June 2019
  • And yet having that used against her in the very same instance to shame her and disempower her and threaten her, in a way.
    — Claire Shaffer, Rolling Stone, 11 June 2021
  • They will be used to prop up narratives that disempower black women and women of colour.
    — Kieran Yates, refinery29.com, 14 Jan. 2020
  • But again, June finds a way to fire back when the Waterfords disempower her.
    — Rena Gross, Billboard, 20 June 2018
  • America worked hard to disempower Haiti and put them in poverty.
    — Jeneé Osterheldt, BostonGlobe.com, 17 May 2022
  • Nothing in their voting record—to disempower unions, and pad the bosses’ fortunes—suggest that will change any time soon.
    — Kate Aronoff, The New Republic, 12 Mar. 2021
  • He was seen as a freedom fighter on behalf of the little people being surveilled, overcharged, and disempowered.
    — Wired, 22 Sep. 2019
  • Local news may need more than is offered here, though disempowering the hedge funds and conglomerates that have wreaked so much havoc is a good place to start.
    — Alex Shephard, The New Republic, 28 Aug. 2019
  • The other is that easterners have been rebelling against a western narrative that has disempowered them.
    — Katrin Bennhold, New York Times, 9 Nov. 2019
  • Who could have expected that a branch of government would willingly disempower themselves?
    — Saul Cornell, The New Republic, 20 Dec. 2019
  • Now is the perfect time for different voices to enter the room to be able to reimagine a new system that isn’t working with the police but working to disempower them.
    — Ernest Owens, Rolling Stone, 12 Feb. 2022
  • As time went on, Dorsey would have eventually joined his fellow founders in the Facebook sphere in feeling disempowered and betrayed.
    — Steven Levy, Wired, 6 Mar. 2020
  • Even though well intended, making unsolicited suggestions about what patients should do is disempowering and rarely works.
    — Carey Purcell, Longreads, 26 Oct. 2017
  • The United States should use its economic weapons not only to disempower the junta but also to support its replacement.
    — Dan Swift, Foreign Affairs, 30 Sep. 2025
  • His values are driving Facebook as the company doubles down on policies that empower demagogues and despots and disempower the rest of us.
    — Alex Shephard, The New Republic, 18 Dec. 2019
  • Morale at Foggy Bottom has cratered, and with Tillerson disempowered, career bureaucrats are unsure how to do their jobs.
    — Tina Nguyen, vanityfair.com, 29 June 2017
  • In their rush to disempower midwives, anti-midwife crusaders inadvertently created a climate in which neonatal care is less safe for all birthing parents.
    — Hannah Giorgis, The Atlantic, 18 June 2024
  • Control in the South has a history of leading to rigging the democratic process — from voting rules to district maps — to disempower Black voters.
    — Nicholas Riccardi, ajc, 15 Mar. 2021
  • Did Frederick Douglass become disempowered by discussing his suffering as a slave?
    — Jeet Heer, The New Republic, 7 May 2018
  • Instead, with engineers now disempowered and management far away in Chicago, the actual building of new planes in Seattle all but stalled.
    — Natasha Frost, Quartz, 3 Jan. 2020
  • Now the Indian part of Kashmir has been divided, disempowered, and degraded.
    — Fahad Shah / Srinagar, Time, 7 Aug. 2019
  • But they are not deliberately engineered by the elites who oversee them to disempower or manipulate ordinary people.
    — Francis Fukuyama, Harper’s Magazine , 27 Apr. 2022
  • Taking away learning and serendipity Finally, this new way of accessing information also can disempower people and takes away their chance to learn.
    — Chirag Shah, The Conversation, 15 Mar. 2023
  • Eliminating that district to disempower those voters was, apparently, not.
    — Adam Serwer, The Atlantic, 19 May 2026
  • Power differentials, on the other hand, can occur when one partner uses manipulation or force to disempower the other and gain control of the relationship.
    — Katie Hurley, CNN, 5 June 2022
  • Russia has long been fabled as the Internet’s most wily mischief-maker, and the nation’s propaganda machine has for years used social and state-backed media to deceive and disempower its enemies.
    — Washington Post, 26 Feb. 2022
  • The term has been popularized by an influential faction within the AI field who are concerned that trying to build machines as smart as humans might disempower or destroy humanity.
    — Cat Zakrzewski, Washington Post, 12 July 2024
  • At the moment, Israel’s right-wing coalition government’s plan to disempower the Supreme Court there is on hold, a mark of grudging deference to what have been the largest peaceful protests in the country’s history.
    — Nicholas Lemann, The New Yorker, 13 June 2023
  • And then there were the violent acts and threats leading up to the election that contributed to an environment that left many voters, in particular people of color and members of minority groups, increasingly disempowered.
    — Bree Newsome, SELF, 15 Nov. 2018

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