How to Use domesticate in a Sentence

domesticate

verb
  • She jokes that dogs are easier to domesticate than men.
  • Horses and oxen have been domesticated to work on farms.
  • At the time, livestock had yet to be domesticated, and camel herds still ran wild.
    — Martin J. Kernan, Scientific American, 30 Sep. 2025
  • Many of them are lightly domesticated, with a glimpse of a house or a small boat left idle by absent actors.
    — Philip Kennicott, Washington Post, 24 July 2023
  • Parrots may be kept as pets, but they are not domesticated animals such as cats or dogs.
    — Lucy Notarantonio, MSNBC Newsweek, 14 Oct. 2025
  • Now, the virus is raising alarms beyond egg prices and the enormous loss of wild and domesticated birds.
    — Maggie O'Neill, SELF, 14 Mar. 2023
  • One of the largest is how many times cats were domesticated in the Middle East.
    — Jerry A. Coyne, Washington Post, 3 May 2023
  • Whether the horse enjoys contact with water might depend on whether the horse has been domesticated or runs freely.
    — Amaris Encinas, USA TODAY, 23 June 2023
  • Women and dogs were domesticated together, in other words — made to be docile, to do as they’re told.
    — Leah Dolan, CNN Money, 23 Dec. 2025
  • To break this cycle, these countries must domesticate AI in health.
    — Francisca Mutapi, semafor.com, 18 May 2026
  • They can't be released into the wild because they are domesticated and lack survival skills.
    — Leah Olajide, Freep.com, 13 Feb. 2026
  • And if humans can figure out a way to domesticate hyenas, then jackals and dingoes cannot be far behind.
    — Joe Queenan, WSJ, 20 Jan. 2022
  • It’s always been known that flu spreads from wild birds to domesticated ones, on ponds or in droppings or via small birds that can squeeze past fan covers.
    — Maryn McKenna, WIRED, 8 Mar. 2023
  • While the majority of yaks are domesticated, wild yaks still exist in small groups.
    — Jack Knudson, Discover Magazine, 6 Feb. 2024
  • Cats have been domesticated for thousands of years; the ancient Egyptians revered some cats as gods.
    — Carl Nolte, San Francisco Chronicle, 24 Jan. 2026
  • Eventually, humans can domesticate some of these plants for food crops.
    — Chris Impey, The Conversation, 23 Sep. 2025
  • Here is a current list of states which allow out-of-state businesses to domesticate within the state's borders.
    — Allbusiness, Forbes, 8 Sep. 2021
  • Rabbits were first domesticated so monks could eat their fetuses.
    — Encyclopedia Britannica, 2 Apr. 2026
  • Has the Hummer been thoroughly domesticated in the past two years, or are most buyers just nuts?
    — Frank Markus, Car and Driver, 9 Sep. 2023
  • Some give him credit for trying to domesticate the Shiite militias.
    — Robert F. Worth, The Atlantic, 28 Oct. 2025
  • This process is akin to how humans have domesticated plants and animals for millennia.
    — Shraddha Lall, The Conversation, 16 Oct. 2025
  • However, scientists still don’t know where and how dogs were first domesticated.
    — Laura Baisas, Popular Science, 25 Mar. 2026
  • What rose out of the doll’s belly was nothing more than a folk song, habituated and domesticated.
    — Cynthia Ozick, The New Yorker, 24 July 2023
  • Jünger’s father was a pharmacist by profession, in an age when death itself seemed to have been domesticated.
    — Thomas Meaney, Harper’s Magazine , 16 Feb. 2023
  • Even though they have been domesticated, many canines still carry remnants of the hunting behavior of wolves.
    — Maria Azzurra Volpe, MSNBC Newsweek, 4 Dec. 2025
  • The same response occurred in wild and domesticated tomatoes.
    — Ashley MacKin Solomon, San Diego Union-Tribune, 9 Sep. 2025
  • Finbar is the longtime gunfighter who works by a strict moral code, looking to finally hang up his spurs and domesticate himself.
    — Katie Walsh, Los Angeles Times, 30 Mar. 2024
  • Both of these iconic pets have been domesticated – evolved and adapted to live alongside humans – for millennia.
    — Hannah Chinn, NPR, 22 Dec. 2025
  • Dogs were likely domesticated more than 14,000 years ago, a new study published this week found.
    — Michelle Del Rey, USA Today, 27 Mar. 2026
  • The traits can be traced back thousands of years, when early humans first started domesticating animals and breeding them to suit their needs.
    — Kelli Bender, PEOPLE.com, 30 Jan. 2018

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