How to Use masochistic in a Sentence

masochistic

adjective
  • Not in a masochistic way, but pain holds hands with pleasure.
    — Vulture, 24 May 2022
  • We were doomed from the start, and our mutual masochistic ways should have been the first clue.
    — Heather Weingold, Los Angeles Times, 26 May 2023
  • This is Kafka at his coldest, his most self-loathing and masochistic.
    — Joy Williams, Harper's Magazine, 2 May 2024
  • But my attraction to masochistic skincare isn't just about guilt.
    — Leigh Cowart, Wired, 30 Sep. 2021
  • Why are these seemingly masochistic workouts on the rise?
    — Ellen O’Brien, SELF, 16 Dec. 2025
  • Kelce will have to be masochistic to find flaws with his performance Sunday night.
    — Josh Peter, USA TODAY, 25 Jan. 2021
  • Duffy gets a distinctive dark clown out of each of them, menacing or masochistic as the case may be.
    — Sara Holdren, Vulture, 17 Sep. 2025
  • Grad school actually seems like the move for someone with a fat stack of cash and a masochistic love of work.
    — Olivia Crandall, Vulture, 13 Jan. 2021
  • Yet the more masochistic elements of the series have been blunted.
    — Will Bedingfield, Wired, 24 Feb. 2022
  • This process can sometimes sound like a masochistic cleansing ritual.
    — New York Times, 18 Jan. 2022
  • His masochistic affair with Isabella is the one that makes your skin prickle.
    — Amy Nicholson, Los Angeles Times, 11 Feb. 2026
  • But only Brandon was daring/masochistic enough to do it for real.
    — Peter Debruge, Variety, 25 Jan. 2022
  • But right now, Facebook is like some weird barman who is slightly masochistic and enjoys the bar fight.
    — Billy Perrigo, Time, 8 Oct. 2019
  • Juarez spent decades at the top of the mountain-bike world, carving out a niche for himself in nearly masochistic endurance events.
    — Graham Averill, Outside Online, 11 Mar. 2020
  • So there is this sort of masochistic attraction where physical torture is also what gets you high at the same time.
    — Taylor Antrim, Vogue, 15 Dec. 2021
  • To me, Tommy’s response to trauma is both masochistic and sadistic.
    — Rob Tannenbaum, New York Times, 23 Mar. 2024
  • Several sections of the book are given over to masochistic exchanges with white men in airports.
    — Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 29 Sep. 2020
  • But Hall isn’t just creating his own masochistic fitness challenges.
    — Men's Health, 28 Apr. 2022
  • The question remains whether suffering with Mare by proxy is noble or masochistic.
    — Alan Sepinwall, Rolling Stone, 13 Apr. 2021
  • To try and sustain a man in free fall for that amount of time was quite exciting for my masochistic kind of sensibility.
    — Georg Szalai, HollywoodReporter, 3 Sep. 2019
  • Each team’s season had a masochistic feel, like shoveling your driveway during a blizzard.
    — Jon Greenberg, The Athletic, 30 Dec. 2024
  • Or like a joyfully masochistic nurse about to administer a gruesome shot.
    — Jon Caramanica, New York Times, 20 Mar. 2020
  • The masochistic double bind is a malign version of the narrator’s problem.
    — Anne Enright, The New York Review of Books, 6 July 2020
  • And while swimming, even distance swimming, is hardly monotonous, the longer races have a masochistic side to them.
    — Andrew Trunsky, New York Times, 8 June 2024
  • Bint Aamir was no masochist, but there’s a masochistic element to Zuhour’s ruminations.
    — Ron Charles, Washington Post, 24 May 2022
  • In some cases the children were as young as toddlers and some of the files depicted sadistic or masochistic abuse, authorities said.
    — Tom Steele, Dallas News, 7 Feb. 2020
  • Turning on the news had become a masochistic act, seeing empty parking lots at airports and schools evoked involuntary winces.
    — Steve Straessle, Arkansas Online, 19 Sep. 2020
  • What these groups have in common, though, is perhaps a fatigue with the masochistic storytelling of our current political era.
    — Robyn Bahr, The Hollywood Reporter, 14 Mar. 2022
  • The pursuit of pleasure ends in punishment, an outcome that satisfies both our judgmental and our masochistic urges.
    — New York Times, 15 May 2018
  • All of the translators in this group, for reasons of temperament and structure, seem to have a masochistic relationship to their work.
    — The Critic, Literary Hub, 27 Aug. 2025

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