How to Use hierarchy in a Sentence

hierarchy

noun
  • He was at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy.
  • The church hierarchy faced resistance to some of their decisions.
  • And so this idea of no hierarchies—that was the idea.
    — Nate Freeman, Vanity Fair, 6 Mar. 2026
  • The hierarchy of both teams has chased greed — and now look at them.
    — Roshane Thomas, New York Times, 24 May 2026
  • There’s this whole weird hierarchy where the chef is revered as this god.
    — Alyson Sheppard, Robb Report, 24 June 2021
  • The truth is that there is a hierarchy.
    — Literary Hub, 18 Mar. 2026
  • On the top rung of that hierarchy was, of course, God.
    — Ryan Huling, Time, 7 May 2026
  • The hierarchy should always be those with the least go first.
    — John Surico, Curbed, 16 Oct. 2023
  • In the hierarchy of needs, that’s at the top of the pyramid, which is nice.
    — Michelle Lee, People.com, 19 June 2025
  • For decades, the hierarchy was clear.
    — Alyson Krueger, Air Mail, 20 June 2026
  • And someone high up in the hierarchy often needs to serve as that voice.
    — Sarah Scoles, Wired, 28 May 2021
  • The word is still spoken and the sense of racial hierarchy is still intact.
    — Michael K. McIntyre, cleveland, 13 Oct. 2019
  • To speak to a Jew would be to lose one’s place in our boyish hierarchy.
    — Cathleen Schine, The New York Review of Books, 16 Mar. 2021
  • Other than that, the meeting is by men and for men — the hierarchy of the church.
    — Nicole Winfield, The Seattle Times, 20 Feb. 2019
  • Long pages with bad visual hierarchy and no way to scan sub-headlines?
    — Talie Smith, Forbes.com, 21 Aug. 2025
  • Floyd lives on a lower rung of the town’s hierarchy than Clark.
    — Vinson Cunningham, New Yorker, 20 Mar. 2026
  • This isn’t to say there needs to be a hierarchy of suffering.
    — R. Eric Thomas, Mercury News, 4 Apr. 2026
  • Where once the ballplayers were the easy marks, now athletes sat at the top of the hierarchy.
    — Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, 4 Aug. 2025
  • In the hierarchy of the ship’s crew, the mail clerks were somewhere in the middle.
    — Susan Seubert, Smithsonian Magazine, 19 Aug. 2021
  • Often there’s no hierarchy in the way the images are laid out.
    — Ray Mark Rinaldi, The Know, 26 Mar. 2020
  • Lue dismissed the idea of any kind of hierarchy, saying the team just needs to play the right way.
    — Chris Fedor, cleveland.com, 19 Jan. 2018
  • The hierarchy were on the pitch afterwards, too, and must have been moved by the scenes.
    — Michael Walker, New York Times, 29 May 2026
  • In her own words, the brash, scathing sound was born from a primal need to resist the hierarchy.
    — Tanu I. Raj, Billboard, 13 Feb. 2023
  • That’s because there’s a strict hierarchy for who gets paid from the assets.
    — Maria Halkias, Dallas News, 18 Sep. 2020
  • And there's hierarchy and cliques and clubs and all these different things.
    — H. Alan Scott jennifer Cunningham, MSNBC Newsweek, 27 Aug. 2025
  • The new cuts conform to the state’s hierarchy of water rights.
    — Kurtis Alexander, San Francisco Chronicle, 20 Aug. 2021
  • See how far the Packers moved up the league's hierarchy.
    — Jim Reineking, USA Today, 2 Sep. 2025
  • But when the trip goes awry, the social hierarchy onboard shifts.
    — Douglas Greenwood, Vogue, 30 May 2022
  • Jamie Dimon doesn’t trust hierarchy to tell him the truth.
    — Eva Roytburg, Fortune, 6 Nov. 2025
  • Salah seemed more secure about himself but took strength from those who felt the same way about his place in the hierarchy.
    — Simon Hughes, New York Times, 14 Jan. 2026

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