How to Use enervate in a Sentence

enervate

verb
  • This may reframe his friend’s enervating habit.
    — Hope Hunt, Baltimore Sun, 30 Jan. 2026
  • Bears do not truly hibernate, but instead enervate, or enter a state of torpor, in their dens.
    — Natalie Krebs, Outdoor Life, 25 Sep. 2025
  • The results are often enervating though sometimes clumsy.
    — Eli Enis, Pitchfork, 3 Feb. 2026
  • Campbell, the North Carolina folk singer, describes an enervating process marked by back-and-forth exchanges and lots of waiting.
    — Jon Blistein, Rolling Stone, 25 Mar. 2026
  • Jenny deflected me with enervating ease.
    — Literary Hub, 13 Mar. 2026
  • The impact of that shocking final scene is sufficient to send viewers out feeling enervated after what’s been a pretty desultory final act.
    — Leslie Felperin, HollywoodReporter, 24 May 2026
  • That shock is severely dampened by Hickey’s enervating pacing; there is nothing steady about the build here, the line graph of the production instead one of sudden lurches.
    — Richard Lawson, HollywoodReporter, 3 Sep. 2019
  • Such flat, enervating filmmaking makes the whole endeavor a shockingly cynical affair.
    — Los Angeles Times, 22 Oct. 2026
  • Its students arrive morally outraged, a priori puritans, while its professors are enervated and dissatisfied.
    — Zain Khalid, Vulture, 1 Oct. 2026
  • Some of these values—such as a disciplined commitment to physical fitness—are good and, in my opinion, necessary correctives to the enervating distractions of 21st-century living.
    — Dan Brooks, The Atlantic, 2 Oct. 2025
  • Looming over all of it has been the sad, enervating situation with Alexander Isak, forever enshrined as a club legend by dint of Wembley last season but now beyond the point of tarnishing that legacy.
    — George Caulkin, New York Times, 10 Aug. 2025

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