How to Use gnomic in a Sentence

gnomic

adjective
  • He made gnomic utterances concerning death.
  • Stuart Hameroff is an impish figure — short, round, with gray hair and a broad, gnomic face.
    — Steve Volk, Discover Magazine, 1 Mar. 2018
  • As well as its trailers, the festival is famous for its gnomic dance routines, and this year was no exception.
    — Damon Wise, Deadline, 5 July 2025
  • Like a somewhat mystical priest, the response came back in a gnomic but optimistic piece of evasion.
    — Jemma Green, Forbes, 4 Aug. 2022
  • In the end, love saves the day but in the most gnomic, Godardian fashion possible.
    — Keith Phipps, Vulture, 23 Apr. 2026
  • Yet her single-mindedness is offset by the lure of her fractured forms, her gnomic sentences, and her fairy-tale settings.
    — Merve Emre, The New Yorker, 4 July 2022
  • In images, the work appears as an eerie, gnomic scattering of 24 tall, white boxes, isolated on a hill.
    — Nikil Saval, New York Times, 2 Mar. 2020
  • For him, even talking about the show, analyzing its secret sauce, is offered up with a certain gnomic reticence.
    — Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 14 June 2024
  • Field adds gnomic nightmares of eerie neighbors and visions of a bed on fire in a jungle lake, all ripped off from Polanski and Weerasethakul.
    — Charles C. W. Cooke, National Review, 9 Nov. 2022
  • Some of the passages closely echo Oyler’s riffs on contemporary foibles, except written in gnomic fragments.
    — Kate Knibbs, Wired, 1 Feb. 2021
  • Like Fitzgerald, Levy has a gift for the pithy, annihilating moment of gnomic insight.
    — Kirsten Denker, The New Republic, 31 Aug. 2021
  • The Messiah is a collection of gnomic scriptural passages that are prophetic in import but offer no story at all.
    — Jan Swafford, The Atlantic, 29 Oct. 2024
  • His own gnomic utterances, his constant wordplay, both onscreen and in interviews, helped maintain the illusion.
    — Bilge Ebiri, Vulture, 14 Sep. 2022
  • Both albums feature gnomic lyrical pronouncements.
    — Rumaan Alam, New Yorker, 26 Sep. 2025
  • Hammons, whose eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch drawing could be said to have precipitated both projects, has played a quiet and somewhat gnomic role in the first one’s realization.
    — Calvin Tomkins, The New Yorker, 2 Dec. 2019
  • His gnomic statement reflects that period when Public Enemy waned.
    — Armond White, National Review, 8 Apr. 2020
  • Then came Reed the freelance auteur, churning out spotty solo albums and delivering gnomic anti-interviews to the press.
    — Jeremy Lybarger, The New Republic, 17 Oct. 2023
  • From here, the stage is set for Cherry’s awakening, masterminded with wide-eyed economy by Corrin’s gnomic Hero.
    — Damon Wise, Deadline, 21 Oct. 2025
  • The process is painful, but its results are unique—the Frank stories are both utterly foreign and purely lucid, a set of gnomic parables that always end in a puff of irony or ambiguity.
    — Sam Thielman, The New Yorker, 9 Aug. 2022
  • For me, the film provided a welcome excuse to read up on Dylan, who has always been a reputable source of enjoyably gnomic quotes, self-mythologizing, and enigmatic asides.
    — Nate Anderson, Ars Technica, 4 Jan. 2025
  • That race introduced Kipchoge, with his gnomic wisdom and inscrutable smile, to a broader audience outside the running aficionados who already worshipped him.
    — The Editors, Outside, 15 Dec. 2025
  • Pop Smoke was a gnomic figure with a rich, booming voice; Fivio is less enigmatic but more entertaining, a charismatic and sometimes witty host who wants to keep everyone happy.
    — Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker, 18 Apr. 2022
  • Mark Frost, who tethered the art-house director’s gnomic vision to the narrative imperatives of network television in the 1990s, has a much lighter touch on the reins this time around.
    — Laura Miller, Slate Magazine, 22 May 2017
  • Mozart probably would not have devised the spare, gnomic opening utterances of the Fantasia on the harpsichord, where sound dies quickly and continuous activity is paramount.
    — Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 14 Nov. 2022
  • The effect is at once childlike and gnomic, persuasive in Margaret Mitsutani’s crisp, consistent translation from the Japanese.
    — Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books, 16 Feb. 2023
  • There’s Duncan’s assistant, Jimmy Jellico, who is mentally challenged but who comes out with astonishing gnomic splinters of wisdom.
    — Joanne Kaufman, WSJ, 23 Apr. 2021
  • It is bookended by two mammoth works featuring a camouflage pattern—an apt motif for an artist who cultivated a facade of blank neutrality, parrying probing questions about his art and inspiration with gnomic sound bites.
    — Brenda Cronin, WSJ, 26 Oct. 2018
  • The strongest lingering image of Vernon in the broader culture is still the bearded woodsman who retreated to the wilderness with a broken heart and returned with a gnomic, insular album that would against all odds come to define its era, or at least one tendency within it.
    — Mitch Therieau, Pitchfork, 8 Apr. 2026
  • Behind Cunningham’s pioneering compositional methods and gnomic pronouncements lies a craftsman whose precision, rigor, and imagination could take your breath away.
    — Marina Harss, The New Yorker, 9 Dec. 2019
  • Zach Galifianakis plays the retired Carl Bardolph, who’s considered a gnomic sage by the Duncans of the world even as his sessions with JoAnne uncover an overgrown child beholden to fits of rage.
    — Alison Herman, Variety, 12 Apr. 2026

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

Last Updated: