How to Use expiation in a Sentence

expiation

noun
  • Then, expiation in the 80th minute.
    — Aidan McLaughlin, Vanity Fair, 12 May 2026
  • What’s more, the film goes beyond who did what into matters of intention and expiation.
    — Joe Morgenstern, WSJ, 9 May 2018
  • That no further expiation of the nation’s sins would be necessary.
    — Graham Hillard, National Review, 22 July 2019
  • Poetry served as an offering to the dead, a form of expiation, a hope for redemption.
    — Edward Hirsch, New Republic, 30 June 2017
  • The result is at once a ghost story, a tale of amour fou, a settling of accounts, and, one senses, a deeply personal act of expiation.
    — Leslie Camhi, The New Yorker, 11 Oct. 2024
  • Redemption wasn’t quite possible for Lee, but there was expiation for the actor.
    — Christian Lorentzen, New Republic, 5 July 2017
  • In that lighter air of expiation, women lit candles on the edge of the street that led from the shrine to the place that marked Hussein’s camp on the field of battle.
    — Aatish Taseer, New York Times, 9 Nov. 2023
  • The music and the movement enacted a ritual of sonic expiation, a freedom born in sound.
    — Adam Bradley Adam Bradley Photographs By D’angelo Lovell Williams Styled By Ian Bradley Nick Haramis Photographs By Lise Sarfati Styled By Suzanne Koller Sasha Weiss Photographs By Justin French Susan Dominus Photographs By Luis Alberto Rodriguez Styled By Charlotte Collet, New York Times, 13 Oct. 2022
  • Afterward, as expiation, the pool was filled in and transformed into a Zen garden, now part of the Bloedel Reserve.
    — David Gilbert, The New Yorker, 4 June 2017
  • Her death must be an expiation, her down-going as sheer, blind, and sudden as the breathless plunge of a Peruvian child hurled down a stony chasm to placate the mountain spirit.
    — Matthew Gavin Frank, Harper's Magazine, 4 May 2023
  • Dickie takes it upon himself to look out for the boy—all the more so since Dickie, having recently committed a murder, seems seized with guilt and hopes for expiation through good works.
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 1 Oct. 2021
  • Apollo was a villain in the first Rocky film, a more nuanced antagonist in the second, a best friend and guru in the third, and a pretext for revenge and the expiation of guilt in the fourth.
    — Vulture, 4 Feb. 2024
  • For her, its conventions enabled catharsis, the expiation of fear of the unknown—as embodied by the serial killer who stalks the pages of this work whistling hymns and wrapping his dog’s leash around the necks of five women.
    — WSJ, 30 Mar. 2018
  • Nevertheless, support for him increasingly sounds like a ceremony of expiation and, ultimately, an act of faith.
    — Charles P. Pierce, Esquire, 20 July 2017
  • Many religious communities around the world include an injunction to acknowledge wrongdoing through expiation.
    — Will Stephenson, Harper's Magazine, 16 Aug. 2023
  • In a vain attempt to ward off further divine retribution, thousands of European men wandered from town to town as flagellants, whipping and scourging themselves in collective acts of expiation.
    — Niall Ferguson Bloomberg Opinion, Star Tribune, 31 July 2021
  • The catalog essays feature ideological arm-twisting and theoretical mind games that leave me wondering whether the people involved regard their joy as a sin demanding expiation.
    — Jed Perl, The New York Review of Books, 3 Aug. 2022
  • For white mediums, communicating with spirits of other races could be a form of expiation, a way to confront violent histories and make cultural amends—or merely crude appropriation, garish performance art that was good for business.
    — Casey Cep, The New Yorker, 24 May 2021
  • And this revelation, investigation, and expiation not only purged the political system but reaffirmed its legitimacy before the public.
    — Mark Danner, The New York Review of Books, 1 July 2021
  • Whether in a miscalculation or (as Jeffreys-Jones somewhat breathlessly speculates) as an act of personal expiation, Colby gave Hersh partial confirmation.
    — Amy Davidson Sorkin, The New Yorker, 3 Oct. 2022
  • This personal accountability is unavoidable in the casting of his daughter Sofia as Michael’s daughter Mary, a figure of sacrifice and expiation just like the totems of fallen religious statuary and the archbishop’s plummeting corpse.
    — Armond White, National Review, 4 Dec. 2020
  • Post-Homeric legends relate that after returning to Ithaca Odysseus traveled to northern Greece to appease Poseidon, having descended to the underworld in the Odyssey to consult the seer Tiresias on the manner of expiation.
    — Gitanjali Roy, Encyclopedia Britannica, 12 June 2026

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