How to Use mimetic in a Sentence

mimetic

adjective
  • It’s supposed to be mimetic of speech.
    — Andrew Marantz, New Yorker, 5 Apr. 2026
  • There are aspects of mimetic desire that are common to all people.
    — Kathy Caprino, Forbes, 4 June 2021
  • See this one on anorexia and obesity, and on mimetic desires.
    — Ed Yong, Discover Magazine, 16 Oct. 2012
  • Films have often been rupture points for mimetic breakthroughs on the internet.
    — Gene Park, Washington Post, 6 Oct. 2022
  • What is travel in the age of Instagram if not mimetic desire with airline miles?
    — Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic, 12 Dec. 2022
  • Underneath it all, the mimetic mechanism is whirring, biding its time between crises.
    — Michelle Orange, Harper's Magazine, 3 Nov. 2023
  • Underneath it all, the mimetic mechanism is whirring, biding its time between crises.
    — Sam Kriss, Harper's Magazine, 16 Oct. 2023
  • But Magritte suggests that art is always mimetic, if not of the external world then at the very least of consciousness.
    — Sebastian Smee, Washington Post, 28 July 2022
  • But, where the mature Calvino found a style that was supremely arch, alien, and spare, his more mimetic stories retain the funk of the human.
    — Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 19 June 2021
  • My heroes are all chameleonic actors who transform and manage to transcend something simply mimetic.
    — Brent Lang, Variety, 10 Feb. 2025
  • Praise, though often hyperbolic or even mimetic, is more easily and leisurely measured out.
    — Nicholas Bell, SPIN, 5 Dec. 2023
  • Arguably, the thing that makes acting an art form, rather than just a series of mimetic gestures, is the actor’s interpretation.
    — Rafaela Bassili, Vulture, 4 Apr. 2024
  • In the study, researchers analyzed the anatomy of tiny muscles used to form facial expressions called mimetic muscles.
    — People Staff, PEOPLE.com, 6 Apr. 2022
  • Perhaps women’s mimetic rivalries are often quieter as a result.
    — Kathy Caprino, Forbes, 4 June 2021
  • Many different groups are currently making their own versions of these spike-mimetic trimers to test their various vaccine designs.
    — Scientific American, 12 May 2020
  • This notion of degeneration owes something to Plato, for whom the visible world is a copy of the eternal forms and mimetic art a copy of that copy.
    — Christopher Beha, Harper's Magazine, 27 Oct. 2020
  • Either combat being known as a mimetic rehash by breaking out of the classic rock mold, or lean even further into their strengths as classic-rock propagandists.
    — Steven J. Horowitz, EW.com, 15 Apr. 2021
  • The aesthetic identity of the game can be elaborated by collecting fragments or mimetic images.
    — Bruce Sterling, WIRED, 21 Apr. 2011
  • Fiction often attempts to capture reality without being coldly mimetic; taxidermy reveals the stakes of that project.
    — Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 21 Aug. 2019
  • Yet one of the book’s signal triumphs is that Alharthi has constructed her own novelistic form to suit her specific mimetic requirements.
    — James Wood, The New Yorker, 7 Oct. 2019
  • For the experiment, the research team quantified how many fast-twitch and slow-twitch fibers wolves and dogs in their mimetic muscles, New Scientist reports.
    — Elizabeth Gamillo, Smithsonian Magazine, 7 Apr. 2022
  • There is a long-standing argument regarding how far mimetic art ought to go in representing the sometimes dispiriting realities of modern life.
    — Christopher Beha, Harper's magazine, 10 Mar. 2019
  • The building block of the internet is a referential, signifying, mimetic, poetics.
    — Los Angeles Times, 24 Feb. 2022
  • The team also plans to investigate if domestication shaped the mimetic muscles of other mammals, Burrows tells Newsweek.
    — Elizabeth Gamillo, Smithsonian Magazine, 7 Apr. 2022
  • Unlike an allusion — a tip of the hat to a previous work — an Easter egg, when found, is an anachronistic disruption, an anti-mimetic breaking of the fourth wall to make room for a joke, clue or grievance.
    — Nick Haramis, New York Times, 13 Jan. 2023
  • His visual descriptions are mimetic—as if the reader’s eye on the page followed a painter’s brush, the falcon reeling and refracted in sunlight painted by Tintoretto, in falling darkness by Rouault.
    — Cynthia Zarin, The New Yorker, 14 Apr. 2017
  • An enduring favorite, the satirical coming-of-age comedy (from director Mark Waters based on a script by Fey) has launched a bevy of endlessly quotable, referential and mimetic turns of phrase.
    — Natalie Oganesyan, Deadline, 9 Sep. 2024
  • This recycling of historical materials, multiplied by the dozens of characters developed in Bomarzo, produces a mimetic effect.
    — Literary Hub, 8 Aug. 2025
  • The mimetic principles already outlined in Vitruvius (primarily the idea that the classical orders imitate the structure of a primitive wooden construction) were, from the start, fig leaves, and widely understood as such.
    — Mario Carpo, Artforum, 1 Feb. 2025
  • That last phrase hints at something beyond the merely mimetic in his work, as in his 1928 painting From Williamsburg Bridge, where the frieze of mismatched façades evokes a quirky family jostling one another for the attention of the camera.
    — Christopher Benfey, The New York Review of Books, 2 Feb. 2023

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