How to Use intelligentsia in a Sentence

intelligentsia

noun
  • How such a basic concept eludes the intelligentsia over here is beyond me.
    — Philip Klein, National Review, 8 Dec. 2023
  • Among Democrats and the left-wing intelligentsia, that’s to be expected.
    — Ellen Carmichael, National Review, 1 Aug. 2021
  • The intelligentsia no longer believes that faith and freedom can be harmonized.
    — Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh, WSJ, 16 June 2019
  • Her days as the farmer’s daughter, a lone voice heckling the East Coast intelligentsia from the sticks, were over.
    — Vanityfair.com, VanityFair.com, 7 Feb. 2017
  • Her days as the farmer’s daughter, a lone voice heckling the East Coast intelligentsia from the sticks, were over.
    — Lili Anolik, VanityFair.com, 19 June 2017
  • For now, these ideas mostly live in the political intelligentsia and online far-right hubs.
    — Abby McCloskey, Twin Cities, 25 Nov. 2025
  • The working and middle class find common cause, along with the unions, military, and intelligentsia.
    — Bruce Sterling, WIRED, 31 July 2011
  • The news media, intelligentsia, and the Twitterverse all went wild.
    — Jerry Hendrix, National Review, 15 Feb. 2018
  • And would all of this have happened with little to no complaint from the conservative intelligentsia?
    — Eric Levitz, Daily Intelligencer, 27 Mar. 2018
  • This connects to how the intelligentsia used to say AI art could never replace human art.
    — James Barrat, Big Think, 2 Sep. 2025
  • Will is perhaps the last remnant of a distinctive slice of the old East Coast intelligentsia.
    — Washington Post, 24 Sep. 2021
  • Their intelligentsia seems determined to ensure that no Midwestern whites ever vote for the party again.
    — Andrew Sullivan, Daily Intelligencer, 3 Nov. 2017
  • The attendees looked mostly bookish; a few of the younger ones wore the beards and browline glasses favored by the transnational intelligentsia.
    — James Angelos, New York Times, 10 Oct. 2017
  • These are people who were the potential liberal forces and intelligentsia of not only Moscow but many other places.
    — David Remnick, The New Yorker, 4 Mar. 2023
  • Members of the basketball intelligentsia routinely describe her as one of the game’s top analysts.
    — Noam Scheiber, New York Times, 28 Apr. 2018
  • The intelligentsia, for the most part, applauded Coleman’s daring.
    — Julian Sancton, Billboard, 5 May 2017
  • Some of the sharpest minds in the fantasy intelligentsia believe that Dalton is one of this year’s best mid-range QB values.
    — Pat Fitzmaurice, SI.com, 2 Aug. 2017
  • In his late teens, Collodi went to work at a respected bookstore in Florence and began to mix with the intelligentsia.
    — Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, 6 June 2022
  • Another problem is that some of the intelligentsia see the success sequence as middle-class norms to be disparaged for being middle-class norms.
    — George Will, Alaska Dispatch News, 6 July 2017
  • Today America’s intelligentsia is in the grip of a hallucinogenic fever dream.
    — Alex Kuczynski, Town & Country, 20 Jan. 2022
  • His decision to emigrate underlined the choices available to the Czech intelligentsia at the time.
    — Daniel Lewis, New York Times, 12 July 2023
  • In post-Putin Russia, there will be no popular demand for democratic reforms and no intelligentsia to promote them.
    — WSJ, 4 Nov. 2022
  • For a long time now this Moscow Patriarchate church has been discussed by patriotic intelligentsia as a kind of fifth column.
    — Fred Weir, The Christian Science Monitor, 17 Apr. 2019
  • An intellectual cannot turn a blind eye when a nation dies after the surrender of its elite (especially since there are only two kinds of elites, the elites of the people and the intelligentsia).
    — Madison Mainwaring, Harper's Magazine, 25 May 2020
  • For dissidents to assume the mantle of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia was therefore no simple matter.
    — Benjamin Nathans september 24, Literary Hub, 24 Sep. 2025
  • Each time conservatives cracked down on reformist activists and blocked their initiatives within the state, the reformist leadership and intelligentsia called on the supporters to be calm.
    — Mohammad Ali Kadivar, Washington Post, 5 Jan. 2018
  • As the global head of arts and culture at Chanel, Yana Peel is uniquely positioned at the intersection of fashion and the intelligentsia.
    — airmail.news, 24 Aug. 2024
  • But among the party’s intelligentsia, all agree there is a common wish that the White House be occupied by a different Republican.
    — Lisa Miller, Daily Intelligencer, 29 Oct. 2017
  • Think of the way Beth Grant has honed the suburban busybody to its sharpest points, or how, with just one sigh, Michael Stuhlbarg serves up the foibles of the intelligentsia on a silver platter.
    — Nate Jones, Vulture, 21 Nov. 2020
  • Ferlinghetti was a veteran both of D-Day, in World War II, and of the left-wing intelligentsia that arose after the war.
    — Sam Whiting, San Francisco Chronicle, 23 Feb. 2021

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