How to Use gruel in a Sentence

gruel

noun
  • At the school, one of the nuns shoves her face into a bowl of gray gruel.
    — Alan Sepinwall, Rolling Stone, 9 Aug. 2023
  • Meals are gruel, which the nurses cart around in large enamel pails.
    — Robert Gottlieb, New York Times, 12 Dec. 2019
  • Salad and leftover gruel from the day before had been laid out.
    — Washington Post, 9 June 2018
  • And if this is the strongest stuff that Durham has, that's pretty thin gruel.
    — Chris Cillizza, CNN, 17 Sep. 2021
  • The options for startups forced to raise money in down markets are so much thin gruel.
    — Kevin Kelleher, Fortune, 24 May 2022
  • Working an absurd amount of hours, spending no money, eating gruel three times a day.
    — Jennifer Mazi, photos By Rich Sugg,, kansascity.com, 23 May 2017
  • That’s when Pro Bowl rosters started to turn into thin gruel.
    — Tim Graham, New York Times, 13 Feb. 2026
  • The plate also serves as a lid for the bowl, with a double gasket that will keep your gruel from slopping out into a pack.
    — T. Edward Nickens, Field & Stream, 7 Apr. 2020
  • The cocoon arrives in the jail cell as a stowaway, an unexpected lump in a bowl of prison gruel.
    — Laura Collins-Hughes, New York Times, 14 Jan. 2018
  • The gruel mixture, which now includes wet food, should be transitioned in as part of their diet until about five or six weeks old.
    — Dallas News, 13 Dec. 2022
  • Seavey asked of a white dog who ate its pile of meat-gruel with exceptional neatness, leaving nothing but a tidy stain on the snow.
    — Zachariah Hughes, Anchorage Daily News, 10 Mar. 2021
  • But even allowing for the erosion of standards, this is thin gruel for both news reporting and legal claims.
    — Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 14 Sep. 2019
  • Guards beat and sometimes killed their captives, who lived on a rice gruel that occasionally included bits of fish.
    — Sig Christenson, ExpressNews.com, 25 May 2020
  • When beginning the transition into wet foods, it is suggested to make a gruel mixture.
    — Dallas News, 13 Dec. 2022
  • The thought of buying 5 acres in Napa conjured up images of us eating cold gruel under a bare lightbulb.
    — Beth Decarbo, WSJ, 20 Nov. 2018
  • Yet the Papadopoulos intelligence was thin gruel—a random comment by a drunk guy making a vague claim.
    — Kimberley A. Strassel, WSJ, 5 Apr. 2018
  • Another option is to cut the gruel with sawdust, though that might make residents (aka potential workers) sick.
    — Steven Strom, Ars Technica, 24 Apr. 2018
  • Having no stomachs to speak of, the carp must eat almost constantly in order to derive energy from this greenish gruel.
    — Jeff Wheelwright, Discover Magazine, 24 June 2012
  • Polenta’s humble origins lay in basic, savory gruel for the poorer classes.
    — David Tanis, New York Times, 2 Mar. 2018
  • Royal adviser suggested retraining self to think of drumsticks not as delicious treat but as hay for horses or gruel for peasants.
    — Kate Greathead, The New Yorker, 14 Jan. 2017
  • Some subsist on the thin gruel of political cartoon shows and online impeachment petitions.
    — Sam Dolnick, miamiherald, 11 Mar. 2018
  • The result, at worst, is work that reinforces reactionary ideologies, and, at best, is a kind of tasteless gruel that leaves no real impression behind.
    — Reid McCarter, Wired, 4 Sep. 2021
  • Helping keep them fed is a volunteer corps of about 80, who work two-hour shifts weighing kittens, taking notes on their eating habits and mixing gruel for those more than a month or so old.
    — Karin Brulliard, The Denver Post, 6 June 2017
  • To signal that Zhou loved the people, he is shown working late while his aides fret about his health, and refusing a bowl of gruel because there are Chinese without enough to eat.
    — The Economist, 24 Oct. 2019
  • In one of the vessels, the types of fatty acids present, and their carbon-13 ratios, suggest that someone had mixed either human breast milk or a thin gruel made from pig fat with the livestock milk.
    — Kiona N. Smith, Ars Technica, 2 Oct. 2019
  • That’s pretty thin gruel compared with the Nasdaq initiative, suggesting that the exchange may have to fall into line now that Nasdaq has set the pace.
    — Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 1 Dec. 2020
  • But in terms of its actual content, the statement was pretty thin gruel, bristling with public relations-style circumlocution and vagueness.
    — Business Columnist, Los Angeles Times, 27 Jan. 2026
  • After arriving at her house, Warwick moved the hypothermic critters to an incubator, injected them with fluids and hand-fed them a mealworm gruel.
    — Margaret Osborne, Smithsonian Magazine, 3 Jan. 2023
  • During Ramadan, Samia Hassan often walks three miles to another Gaza neighborhood to line up for wheat gruel cooked in a large cauldron over an open fire.
    — The Christian Science Monitor, 8 June 2018
  • Mehetabel was treating her daughter Sarah Huntington (Adriana Mazza), one of her 10 children with gruel.
    — Kitty Leshay, Courant Community, 14 June 2017

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