How to Use elegy in a Sentence

elegy

noun
  • In Berceuse Parish, there are so many elegies.
    — Literary Hub, 20 Feb. 2026
  • Much of the chapter is like an elegy to what would be lost.
    — Shaun McKinnon, AZCentral.com, 5 Aug. 2025
  • Not every elegy comes in the form of a dying fall.
    — Rebecca Mead, New Yorker, 3 Sep. 2025
  • This is her elegy, her memorial, her voice, her face.
    — Sophie Monks Kaufman, IndieWire, 3 Sep. 2025
  • This tribute to the living was also an elegy, a lament for the dead.
    — CBS News, 16 Feb. 2020
  • What a gift to read her intimate elegy to her best friend, who died by suicide.
    — The Week Us, theweek, 16 Apr. 2024
  • To say an elegy by heart/to zero our dying before birth.
    — Literary Hub, 1 Apr. 2026
  • Perhaps most notably, both feel like elegies for a past in which those men were very comfortable.
    — Alissa Wilkinson, Vox, 14 Dec. 2018
  • The album serves as an elegy, mixtape and soundtrack, all in one.
    — Oliver Wang, Los Angeles Times, 26 Jan. 2023
  • These short essays are like ekphrastic poems, or odes, or elegies, or fan letters.
    — Mary Ann Grossmann, Twin Cities, 28 Jan. 2024
  • Streams of information flow into and over each other in an elegy about who was who, and when, and why.
    — Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire, 6 Dec. 2024
  • But in the end, Proulx’s book is an elegy, an ode to what future generations will not know.
    — WIRED, 27 Sep. 2022
  • The dark drama that unfolds is an elegy to that vanished vanishing world.
    — Sam Sacks, WSJ, 30 Apr. 2021
  • The Irishman feels like an apotheosis, an elegy, and a penance all at once.
    — Jack Hamilton, The Atlantic, 31 Oct. 2019
  • Cabral wrote this lovely elegy for his late mentor shortly after Gold’s death last year.
    — Julia Wick, Los Angeles Times, 20 July 2019
  • The result is a novel that reclaims and refashions the genre of the elegy, charging it with as much eros as pathos.
    — Lauren Michele Jackson, The New Yorker, 12 Sep. 2022
  • Immigration tales tend to adopt a hybrid form—part elegy for life in the home country, part hymn to the promise of the new.
    — Tope Folarin, The Atlantic, 8 Nov. 2025
  • Freaknik is an ode to a unique city, and an elegy for one of the greatest music festivals that ever existed.
    — Laura Jane Standley, The Atlantic, 27 Dec. 2019
  • But for the most part, Chris the Swiss is a fascinating, moving elegy for doomed youth.
    — Stephen Dalton, The Hollywood Reporter, 22 May 2018
  • Notes of elegy sound throughout, laments for something too good to last, but also for a moment of honest and urgent revolt.
    — Michelle Orange, The New Yorker, 1 Mar. 2024
  • When Mungo the squirrel died — killed by a dog — Franklin composed a loving elegy.
    — John Kelly, Washington Post, 16 Apr. 2018
  • Today, the commissioner's words serve as an elegy for a paradise that was lost again for the 69th straight time.
    — Bill Livingston, cleveland.com, 12 Oct. 2017
  • The Invite is a humor and light-verse contest, and so the Empress is not looking for flowery elegies.
    — Washington Post, 2 Jan. 2020
  • The Stalemate is part wacky buddy comedy, part poignant Western elegy – and just straight up a ton of fun.
    — Matt Grobar, Deadline, 28 Apr. 2025
  • And then on March 29, Swift published an elegy for Partridge.
    — Jesse David Fox, Vulture, 1 Apr. 2024
  • And then on March 29, Swift published an elegy for Partridge.
    — Jesse David Fox, Vulture, 1 Apr. 2024
  • Those works, by artists like Corot and Millet were elegy, not celebration — a somber look at a way of life fading away.
    — Globe Staff, BostonGlobe.com, 21 June 2023
  • The work is at once an elegy, a historical document and a meditation on tests of survival that gay men face.
    — R. Daniel Foster, Forbes.com, 29 Aug. 2025
  • The spare elegies of winter have left their mark; the elegant literary novels of spring have come and gone; the big juicy beach reads of summer are just beginning.
    — Constance Grady, Vox, 20 July 2024
  • The novel’s nostalgia for a simpler time, one that still believes in clues, renders it a kind of elegy for conviction itself.
    — Literary Hub, 10 Dec. 2025

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