How to Use forbidding in a Sentence

forbidding

adjective
  • These are totems to people who made art through forbidding years.
    — Jenn Pelly, New York Times, 22 Oct. 2020
  • The future may be unknown and forbidding, but one thing is clear.
    — Matthew Continetti, National Review, 13 Oct. 2023
  • But here’s where the movie starts to beckon us onto a rather forbidding track.
    — Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 9 Apr. 2024
  • This back-and-forth dance with the machine made the whole process of coding less forbidding.
    — Clive Thompson, WIRED, 29 July 2024
  • When Gary heads out to find him, the story grows forbidding and a little kinky.
    — Anita Felicelli, Washington Post, 16 Mar. 2023
  • Like them, she will be greeted by a forbidding array of problems.
    — Stephen Castle, BostonGlobe.com, 5 Sep. 2022
  • When bad things go down in Charles Dickens, the scene is set in a forbidding moor.
    — Washington Post, 10 Aug. 2021
  • Yet the most forbidding aspect of the movie isn’t any of those squeamish occurrences.
    — Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 23 May 2022
  • Rather, the moon is wet, abundant with water that is largely stored away in the form of ice in the forbidding craters at its poles.
    — Christian Davenport, Washington Post, 9 Jan. 2023
  • Children and families came in through a forbidding brick entrance.
    — James S. Russell, New York Times, 8 Nov. 2020
  • The hike out to it is one of San Diego County’s most famous, and most forbidding.
    — Abby Hamblin, San Diego Union-Tribune, 30 Dec. 2025
  • In the clinical white of the gallery, art can be forbidding, aggrieved, elite, academic.
    — Walker Mimms, New York Times, 4 Jan. 2024
  • Hit the tee shot at least 250 yards into what could be a decidedly forbidding wind.
    — Jin Yu Young, New York Times, 19 July 2023
  • Each shot looks like a page out of a cursed tome of twisted, postmodern fairy tales, the images forbidding and slightly abstract.
    — Bilge Ebiri, Vulture, 6 Mar. 2025
  • Slowly, the color drains out of the image and the green frontier becomes a forbidding, black-and-white expanse.
    — Bilge Ebiri, Vulture, 21 June 2024
  • Outsiders face a forbidding confusion of agencies with acronyms.
    — The Economist, 20 June 2020
  • The west coast of Ireland is home to miles of wild and forbidding landscape, and the warmest most hospitable people in the world.
    — Usa Today Travel Team, USA TODAY, 31 Dec. 2020
  • This wasn’t a joyous festival of sport; this was a forbidding fortress of separation.
    — Christine Brennan, USA TODAY, 21 Feb. 2022
  • Rollin’s depiction of the area is stark and forbidding, though his depiction of the lovers is natural and charming.
    — Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader, 1 Mar. 2018
  • Southwell, hands folded and eyes focused laser-like ahead of him, sits formally before a rich green wall nearly as forbidding as his dark clothing.
    — Los Angeles Times, 26 Oct. 2021
  • Celebrities have a unique power to amplify an issue to a wide and diverse audience, and make a touchy subject less forbidding.
    — Fiorella Valdesolo, Vogue, 11 Dec. 2023
  • Early on, the piece is spare and a bit forbidding, with relentless repetitions of solitary figures.
    — Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 27 Jan. 2025
  • This would supply the template for two later books, in which a single vicious memory is at once forbidding and revealing—an event as lock and key.
    — Tobi Haslett, Harper's Magazine, 18 Sep. 2023
  • These were simplified brief restatements of the forbidding articles of 1960 on which they were based.
    — Brian Domitrovic, Forbes, 4 Apr. 2021
  • Precisely because of its forbidding location, Amarna escaped the fate of sites in the more urban north, which were plundered and built over.
    — Clay Risen, New York Times, 29 May 2024
  • His prose is equally forbidding—dense and abstract, in the long tradition of German philosophy.
    — Adam Kirsch, The Atlantic, 3 May 2026
  • Coach Frank Reich better find some bubble gum and baling wire in the coming weeks if his team is to survive its forbidding early season schedule.
    — Nate Davis, USA TODAY, 12 Aug. 2021
  • The East Village streets during the pandemic became forbidding places at 2 o’clock in the morning, when the puppy needed a walk.
    — John Leland, BostonGlobe.com, 21 May 2022
  • Exactly how the Devils River got its forbidding name is lost to history, but there is little doubt the harsh terrain and fierce natives who once reigned here played a role.
    — John MacCormack, ExpressNews.com, 19 June 2020
  • Nearly all wild horses live in the Great Basin of Nevada and surrounding states, in some of the most forbidding land in America.
    — New York Times, 12 May 2018

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