How to Use formalism in a Sentence

formalism

noun
  • There’s formalism to burn here.
    — David Fear, Rolling Stone, 7 Nov. 2025
  • From one point of view, quantum physics is just a set of formalisms, a useful tool kit.
    — James Gleick, New York Times, 8 May 2018
  • Despite all its formalism, math is not meant to have sacred texts that only the priests can read.
    — Quanta Magazine, 10 Oct. 2019
  • This follows the swing toward formalism in other parts of the house.
    — Abby Wolner, Better Homes & Gardens, 5 Feb. 2026
  • And because of that, there’s a very rigid formalism to it, on just the formatting level.
    — Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times, 19 Dec. 2024
  • Democracy may have been reduced to a crude civic formalism, but many are still fighting for a democratic life.
    — Blair McClendon, The New Republic, 19 Jan. 2021
  • That sort of structural formalism is a part of the rote methodology that governs the thought of people who don’t have better ideas.
    — Ben Yagoda, WSJ, 1 Sep. 2017
  • This is an early appeal to ideas of artistic formalism that would later triumph in abstraction.
    — Philip Kennicott, Washington Post, 14 July 2022
  • What places Clark in that tradition is not his formalism but rather his sonic imagination.
    — Cat Cardenas, Rolling Stone, 14 Mar. 2024
  • The advance laid the groundwork for the entire formalism of black hole thermodynamics.
    — Adrian Cho, Science | AAAS, 14 Mar. 2018
  • Bell was a proponent of formalism, a school of thought that places beauty and artistic merit within the properties of an object.
    — Ed Yong, Discover Magazine, 6 July 2011
  • The papers, which ran to more than 500 pages, were written in a novel formalism and contained many new terms and definitions.
    — Quanta Magazine, 21 Dec. 2015
  • And Haynes’s inept formalism is a poor version of Losey-epigone Peter Strickland’s high-style irony.
    — Armond White, National Review, 10 Jan. 2024
  • It is almost assumed that the static camera does not allow that sensitivity, as if falling into a formalism.
    — Emiliano Granada, Variety, 21 Feb. 2022
  • Several experts agreed that real numbers don’t seem to be physically real, and that physicists need a new formalism that doesn’t rely on them.
    — Quanta Magazine, 7 Apr. 2020
  • The implacable formalism of much 1960s art strikes a different note beside such pieces.
    — Jerry Saltz, Vulture, 19 Sep. 2025
  • The Supreme Court of the United States performs its duties with a theatrical formalism.
    — Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, 11 Nov. 2019
  • From concert halls to cabarets, French composers and their American counterparts created new works that ran the gamut from cool formalism to le jazz hot.
    — Georgia Rowe, The Mercury News, 17 Mar. 2017
  • Its ironic tone sets aside formalism and complex narratives to allow for the naturalness and simplicity of the characters and its plots to shine.
    — Anna Marie De La Fuente, Variety, 20 Sep. 2021
  • The movie’s originality indeed stems from its refusal to stick to the playbook of chilly formalism followed by so much contemporary art cinema.
    — Jon Frosch, HollywoodReporter, 3 Sep. 2019
  • The cinematography is a little more anonymous than the cool, blanched formalism that Dupieux usually delivers, but the editing picks up the slack.
    — Jessica Kiang, Variety, 11 Feb. 2022
  • The result, alas, doesn’t live up to the promise of the occasion, turning the character’s journey into fodder for a sluggish exercise in formalism.
    — Jon Frosch, The Hollywood Reporter, 3 Sep. 2022
  • The latter is rooted in conceptual formalism, sculpture, space theory, land art and performance.
    — Martino Carrera, Footwear News, 3 Sep. 2019
  • Many did not get the joke, taking Bourbaki’s dense formalism too seriously and thereby missing the import of the intervention.
    — Michael Barany, JSTOR Daily, 24 Mar. 2021
  • There is no formalism, no repeating motifs, only a rush of motion meant to read as naturalistic to contemporary audiences.
    — Rachel Howard, San Francisco Chronicle, 24 Jan. 2026
  • Salterini says contemporary dance is the bringing together the formalism and bravado of ballet, the earthiness of modern dance and the rhythms and syncopation of jazz dance.
    — Diana Dunbar, miamiherald, 17 Apr. 2018
  • Chief among these attributes is a songbook that’s deep and sturdy, weathered enough to showcase how the trio is a tight and efficient unit, keeping hooks at the forefront without succumbing to the formalism of power pop.
    — Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rolling Stone, 16 Mar. 2024
  • The film is also sort of a lush set piece; with the dad’s northern California winery aesthetic juxtaposed against the prim formalism of the mom’s London sitting rooms.
    — Vogue, 17 July 2023
  • Writer/director Maybury tells this turbulent story with the acerbic wit and fragmented formalism befitting of the titular artist and his work.
    — Samantha Bergeson, IndieWire, 6 Mar. 2025
  • The justification for this austerity is a kind of cleansing formalism, which attempts to illuminate the medium’s kinship with more respectable forms of design.
    — Julian Lucas, The New Yorker, 30 June 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'formalism.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: