How to Use habituate in a Sentence

habituate

verb
  • The wildlife team tends to the cubs while wearing bear suits to avoid habituating the cubs to humans.
    — Isabel Yip, NBC news, 27 Mar. 2026
  • Anyone who lives near the forests or mountains attracts and then habituates bears with food trash.
    — Alaska Dispatch News, 7 July 2017
  • This is what happens to someone habituated to dashing off tweets at all hours.
    — Fred Kaplan, Slate Magazine, 6 Apr. 2017
  • In fact, they’d merely been habituated, the way a bird learns to ignore a rhino.
    — AFAR Media, 30 Oct. 2025
  • Human beings habituate to anything that stays the same or is patterned.
    — Matt Abrahams, TIME, 17 Feb. 2025
  • Could the bear have become habituated by campers/homeowners who did not secure food or left garbage out?
    — Alaska Dispatch News, 25 June 2017
  • Handing out cash now may habituate segments of the population to hold out for more perks in the future.
    — Edward Segal, Forbes, 28 May 2021
  • But people habituate to, and then desensitize to, doom overuse.
    — Tom Yulsman, Discover Magazine, 31 July 2023
  • Still, with a couple of hours to kill, they were determined, or maybe just habituated, to make and post one of their signature short videos.
    — Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker, 19 Feb. 2024
  • But researchers can only reach the few animals that have been habituated to humans.
    — Kai Kupferschmidt, Science | AAAS, 2 Aug. 2017
  • What rose out of the doll’s belly was nothing more than a folk song, habituated and domesticated.
    — Cynthia Ozick, The New Yorker, 24 July 2023
  • In a country without freedom or good health care, for example, people can habituate to what’s not good rather than struggling against it.
    — Jessica Dulong, CNN, 23 Feb. 2024
  • What was annoying back then is now maddening for those habituated to modern broadband speeds.
    — Alice Bonasio, Ars Technica, 22 Aug. 2017
  • If a person habituates this combination of actions and inner qualities, they can be said to have virtue.
    — Big Think, 28 Nov. 2024
  • But by habituating students to its offerings at a young age, Google obtains something much more valuable.
    — Natasha Singer, New York Times, 13 May 2017
  • The normally skittish apes are hard to see in the wild, except for a few populations that have been habituated to the presence of humans.
    — Nick Lunn, National Geographic, 13 Mar. 2018
  • Women habituated to this style of interacting with others are perhaps not the best prepared to fight back if they are mistreated.
    — Judy Dushku, The Cut, 13 Feb. 2018
  • That keeps the waterfowl, raptors and songbirds habituated to the slow-moving vehicles and wary to people.
    — Tom Stienstra, SFChronicle.com, 23 Nov. 2019
  • Past breeding attempts were based on the idea that by minimizing contact with their human keepers, the captive creatures don't habituate to their strange hairless helpers.
    — Maya Wei-Haas, Smithsonian, 6 Apr. 2018
  • Only those animals too ill or human-habituated remain at the sanctuary.
    — Angelina Jolie, Harper's BAZAAR, 11 Oct. 2017
  • This surge is not a fleeting trend but a true shift in that consumers are now habituated to browsing vast product ranges online, reading reviews and making informed purchases.
    — Andre Claudio, Sourcing Journal, 30 July 2024
  • But last year, one of the state’s 10 resurgent wolf packs became unusually habituated to hunting and eating livestock instead of wild prey.
    — Sharon Bernstein, Sacbee.com, 6 Feb. 2026
  • The United States is habituated to sanctions as a way to deal with challenges that don’t rise to the level of armed response but are too transgressive to ignore.
    — Adham Sahloul, Foreign Affairs, 4 Sep. 2020
  • One potentially lethal consequence for humans is that baiting bears with food such as doughnuts habituates them to the human scent, thus increasing the risk of attacks on people.
    — Kathleen Parker, The Denver Post, 13 Mar. 2017
  • The rehabilitation process also hinges on whether caregivers can avoid habituating the animal to people by having too much contact with them.
    — Peter Holley, ajc, 1 Apr. 2017
  • Most studies have bred or habituated fish to elevated CO2 conditions over a few days or months—an extremely short time frame.
    — Danielle L. Dixson, Scientific American, 1 June 2017
  • The experiment was conducted in eight meters of open water at a research site in the Mediterranean Sea where the local wild fish are habituated to the presence of divers.
    — Grrlscientist, Forbes, 25 Feb. 2025
  • Naturally habituating the jaguars to safari cruisers—which is not about taming the cats, but keeping them wild and free, yet also comfortable around the vehicles—does more than ensure sightings.
    — Stephanie Vermillion, Vogue, 13 Aug. 2024
  • Coyotes, in response to the increase of human presence and human attractants, are being habituated or desensitized to humans.
    — Sara Cardine, La Cañada Valley Sun, 5 Sep. 2019
  • Ukrainians are now habituated to rolling blackouts, but the electricity supply falls far short of what the country needs, inducing severe economic disruption.
    — Thomas Popik, Foreign Affairs, 3 Feb. 2023

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