How to Use mistress in a Sentence

mistress

noun
  • His wife suspected that the woman she'd seen with him was his mistress.
  • The dog was always obedient to its master and mistress.
  • Why does the mistress get to do wrong and flaunt it?
    — Abigail Van Buren, Boston Herald, 30 May 2026
  • Fate is a harsh mistress, David.
    — David Frum, The Atlantic, 4 Mar. 2026
  • Europe can be a wife not a mistress.
    — Stephen Fowler, NPR, 19 Dec. 2025
  • Guy comes home from the war with a mistress and is killed by his wife and her lover.
    — Sean Woods, Rolling Stone, 26 Apr. 2022
  • Both his wife and his mistress think the world of him at the end of the book, for example.
    — James Folta, Literary Hub, 6 Nov. 2025
  • Su’s boss instructs her to lie about his whereabouts on calls from both his wife and his mistress.
    — Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker, 1 Sep. 2023
  • The Moon may be a harsh mistress, but hopefully not too harsh.
    — Ars Technica, 5 Mar. 2025
  • Gone are the days of the mistress calling the home phone during dinner time.
    — NBC News, 6 June 2017
  • Her mistress’s life is the point, and the maid is only an extension of it.
    — Hilton Als, New Yorker, 29 July 2025
  • Choute, the mistress whom his father had threatened to leave with in the middle of the war.
    — Literary Hub, 6 May 2026
  • She’s done this enough times to know the mistress will take the hardest hit in the aftermath.
    — Tomris Laffly, Variety, 2 Sep. 2024
  • Fit is a fickle mistress in the NBA.
    — Jace Frederick, Twin Cities, 27 Feb. 2026
  • She was taught to read and write by the benevolent mistress whose family owned her.
    — Sam Roberts, BostonGlobe.com, 29 July 2023
  • But the algorithm can be a fickle mistress.
    — Chris Murphy, Vanity Fair, 20 Jan. 2026
  • Prosecutors claim David used some of the cash to buy his mistress a car and a house.
    — Chris Spargo, PEOPLE, 1 July 2026
  • She was told the teenager was being groomed to be Mike Pence’s mistress.
    — Laura Zornosa, chicagotribune.com, 28 Oct. 2020
  • Hedda, so determined to be mistress of her own emotions, is felled.
    — Kate Erbland, IndieWire, 8 Sep. 2025
  • Hindsight is a fickle mistress.
    — Sean Keeler, Denver Post, 4 Jan. 2026
  • The event was like watching a politician deny an affair while holding the hand of his mistress.
    — Ian Parker, The New Yorker, 7 Aug. 2023
  • Married 66 years, his wife, Jeanette, is his muse, but nature is his mistress.
    — Mike Klingaman, Baltimore Sun, 17 Aug. 2023
  • The mistresses talk about the party as a labor of love, calling in favors from friends.
    — Jireh Deng, Los Angeles Times, 12 Sep. 2023
  • For a fine artist, inspiration comes from either above or within and is a harsh mistress.
    — Daisy Rockwell, Vogue, 27 Nov. 2025
  • When Nathalie Léger was around nine years old, her father’s mistress moved into the house next door.
    — Nicole Rudick, The New York Review of Books, 19 Aug. 2021
  • Jude is bitter, cold and uptight, having spent her entire adult life as the mistress of a married man.
    — Marion Winik, Star Tribune, 31 July 2020
  • Chekhov famously referred to his writing as his mistress, his career as his wife.
    — Liana Finck, New Yorker, 21 Aug. 2025
  • French filmmaker Maïwenn will both direct and star in the project as the title mistress.
    — Jessica Wang, EW.com, 10 Aug. 2022
  • With any of these, the temptation is there to focus on the younger makers, rather than their wiser mistress.
    — A.d. Amorosi, Variety, 22 Aug. 2021
  • The loss of cash puts a target on the back of that married politician’s mistress (Sasha Calle).
    — Randy Myers, Mercury News, 4 Mar. 2026

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