How to Use feudal in a Sentence

feudal

adjective
  • The town is governed by some rules that seem to come straight from feudal times.
    — Alex Marshall, New York Times, 23 Sep. 2022
  • That feels like a feudal monarchy.
    — Etan Vlessing, HollywoodReporter, 5 Sep. 2025
  • There’s something almost feudal about the co-op board.
    — Matthew Sedacca, Curbed, 14 Aug. 2025
  • My parents grew up in a China that was near-feudal.
    — Literary Hub, 11 Feb. 2026
  • But the phrase came to mean more than simply a way of escaping feudal bondage.
    — Jonah Goldberg Tribune News Service (tns), Star Tribune, 27 Oct. 2020
  • And what about those feudal lords of the rapidly declining tech era?
    — Nick Lichtenberg, Fortune, 31 Dec. 2022
  • The feudal calculus lives and breeds, but its habitat is wealth not land.
    — Adam Tooze, The New York Review of Books, 28 Jan. 2020
  • Ritsurin was built 400 years ago as a daimyo garden for feudal lords to stroll in.
    — Lale Arikoglu, Condé Nast Traveler, 2 May 2026
  • Learn how feudal lords once dined and entertained in this historic setting.
    — Bon Appétit, Bon Appetit Magazine, 4 Dec. 2025
  • Mr Abe comes from Yamaguchi, known in feudal times as Choshu.
    — The Economist, 11 Jan. 2018
  • South Dakota barred any limit at all, akin to feudal England.
    — Evan Osnos, The New Yorker, 16 Jan. 2023
  • Apparently, those feudal lords knew how to party into the wee hours.
    — Laurie Ochoa, Los Angeles Times, 21 Dec. 2024
  • Ronin takes its name from the samurai warriors of feudal Japan who did not serve any particular lord.
    — NBC News, 30 Mar. 2022
  • Sicily was making selling citrus fruits around the world after the breakdown of the old feudal order.
    — Tom McTague, The Atlantic, 8 Feb. 2022
  • The ninja were seen as covert agents of feudal Japan, who relied on espionage and strategy.
    — David Aaro, Fox News, 21 Aug. 2020
  • Even the feudal days of the early 1900s, most people were full-time employees.
    — The Politics Of Everything, The New Republic, 18 Jan. 2023
  • This year's samurai theme honors the military caste that rose to prominence in feudal Japan over many centuries.
    — Kimi Robinson, azcentral, 18 Feb. 2020
  • His wish is granted, the body appearing on the grounds of the mansion that rules over the peasant’s feudal community.
    — Anna Marie De La Fuente, Variety, 22 Feb. 2023
  • His response might seem callous given that millions of Afghans face a return to the dark ages of feudal Taliban rule.
    — CNN, 13 Aug. 2021
  • Previously, in many feudal estates, a widow had rights to parts of her husband's holdings, as well as the right to glean crops from other fields.
    — Silvia Federici, Scientific American, 17 Apr. 2023
  • That was before the rules kicked in, before the fortresses had been erected and their feudal lords had exiled anyone who dared deviate too much from the norm.
    — Stephen Galloway, The Hollywood Reporter, 16 Mar. 2018
  • Gone are the tropes of the previous mainline games, replaced with an open world set in the ancient past, heavily based on feudal Japan.
    — Washington Post, 22 Apr. 2022
  • Some accuse the family of gentrifying the town, or treating it like a kind of feudal society.
    — Jessica Mathews, Fortune, 3 Apr. 2026
  • That chipping noise across the NFL is star quarterbacks tearing down the wall of feudal power.
    — Dave Hyde, sun-sentinel.com, 8 May 2021
  • This meant having a say in how costumes, wigs and the sets had to be authentic to the world of 1600 feudal Japan.
    — Jazz Tangcay, Variety, 1 Aug. 2024
  • Judging from the imagery in the trailer above, pre-League Sinnoh region looks a lot like feudal Japan.
    — Emily Palmer Heller, Vulture, 26 Feb. 2021
  • These throwing weapons were used by ninjas, the mysterious covert agents of feudal Japan, 430 years ago.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 26 Feb. 2022
  • Because the feudal courts, chivalric codes, and aristocratic patronage that had sustained it were gone.
    — Daniel Birnbaum, Artforum, 2 Apr. 2026
  • Unclaimed property laws date back to feudal England, when the Crown was quick to seize control of land owned by citizens who had no heirs.
    — Michael Waters, The Atlantic, 27 Aug. 2019
  • The visit was a step back in time, and Meenakshi and Amrita were taken with Caldas’s stories of war and feudal lords.
    — Shivani Vora, Washington Post, 21 June 2019

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