How to Use marginalia in a Sentence

marginalia

plural noun
  • The messier aspects of a person’s life are treated as marginalia.
    — Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter, 22 Sep. 2022
  • My marginalia became a series of handholds on the placid smoothness of the page.
    — New York Times, 2 Nov. 2021
  • Is the practice of marginalia a bad habit or a beneficial endeavor?
    — Brianne Kane, Scientific American, 19 Sep. 2025
  • The real creative triumph is in the throwaway bits—the screenwriting marginalia.
    — Kyle Smith, WSJ, 16 June 2022
  • This space invites your contemplation and reactions to the text but not as marginalia, as full dialogue.
    — Michael Kleber-Diggs Special To The Star Tribune, Star Tribune, 4 Sep. 2020
  • Leading writers have striven to explain these marginalia as progressive.
    — Michael Marissen, New York Times, 30 Mar. 2018
  • Called marginalia, these markups can be elaborate, with notes that nearly fill full pages and that are color-coordinated with the book’s cover.
    — Brianne Kane, Scientific American, 19 Sep. 2025
  • This common medieval practice of marginalia as a space for the delightful, the grotesque, and the zany is enchantingly Groff’s as well.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 2 Sep. 2021
  • Its binding is broken and pages marked with marginalia and coffee stains from hours teaching in the lab—traces of a teacher inspiring the creativity of others.
    — Theresa McCulla, Smithsonian, 16 Sep. 2019
  • Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is bursting with ideas that feel like clever marginalia on an otherwise familiar setup.
    — Bilge Ebiri, Vulture, 27 Mar. 2026
  • Outside of a few brave diplomats on the marginalia of American strategic policy, America is still largely mute.
    — Craig Hooper, Forbes, 3 Aug. 2022
  • Art as cult fodder, marginalia, obscurantism—Duchamp inaugurated all of this.
    — Sebastian Smee, The Atlantic, 29 June 2026
  • Scholars have preserved about 400 volumes that contain Stalin’s pometki—markings, notes and marginalia.
    — Michael O’Donnell, WSJ, 4 Feb. 2022
  • Bookmarking and highlighting remain the only counterparts to dogearing and marginalia.
    — Ian Bogost, The Atlantic, 14 Sep. 2021
  • And everything— from crap scheduling to dubious rain delays to the cancellation of Gemlife —becomes marginalia.
    — Jon Wertheim, SI.com, 12 June 2019
  • The interstitial collage elements play the role of footnotes, or more accurately, the marginalia of a slightly older, wiser reader revisiting a beloved book.
    — Christina Catherine Martinez, Los Angeles Times, 30 Jan. 2023
  • All the while, Rumsfeld produced his proverbs, doodling mystic marginalia in the pages of history, reducing war and torture and other awful realities into blunt queries and gruff turns of phrase.
    — Washington Post, 1 July 2021
  • Both book and marginalia are acts of writing, collaborations between author and subject, text and reader — precisely the sort of communal-meaning making to which Barthes refers.
    — New York Times, 2 Nov. 2021
  • In the marginalia of Destiny's storytelling, which is where most of its story craft up until now has resided, there's an event called the Great Disaster which looms large over the moon's history.
    — Wired, 3 Oct. 2019
  • The male novelist sends me his notes on Nietzsche, written during his undergraduate years, with his anxious marginalia listing which philosophers remained unmarried.
    — New York Times, 19 May 2020
  • There’s no actual metal on Pareidolia, just fragments that Muir has excavated from metal’s marginalia and spun into what resembles a kaleidoscope filled with black beads.
    — Brad Sanders, Pitchfork, 8 June 2026
  • The edition is full of marginalia indicating that Ronald took a trip through the Veneto with this book, making notes about the 16th century architecture that dominates that region.
    — David Netto, Town & Country, 4 May 2018
  • Famous writers such as Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe are somewhat known for their marginalia, making their biographers both overjoyed and overwhelmed.
    — Brianne Kane, Scientific American, 19 Sep. 2025

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