How to Use patois in a Sentence

patois

noun
  • In patois and in mood, the game manages to be both dystopian and comic, dark and light.
    — Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker, 14 May 2018
  • J’Ouvert is patois [from French] for ‘the day opens,’ not the day is already open.
    — Gregory Scruggs, The Root, 2 Sep. 2017
  • And that’s to say nothing of its salty language and the irresistible carny patois that peppers its prose.
    — David Mermelstein, WSJ, 22 May 2021
  • Cloud spoke in a quarter-time cadence, a patois of enduring patience.
    — Niela Orr, New York Times, 22 Dec. 2023
  • Sasse’s words sometimes tumble out in a kind of techno-futurist patois that can be hard to follow.
    — Michael Sokolove, New York Times, 7 Sep. 2023
  • Cooper excavates local details and lingers on the place’s patois.
    — Jina Moore, New York Times, 17 Mar. 2017
  • There are hardly any cute comic-relief characters speaking in bleeps, grunts, or cringey patois.
    — Jon Michaud, The New Yorker, 22 Nov. 2022
  • Amusingly, that mural is between the restrooms, so people waiting in line can brush up on their patois.
    — Susan Dunne, courant.com, 28 Jan. 2022
  • Kling’s patois was developed over time, in a push and pull with aesthetic traditions and his own training.
    — Vogue, 26 Mar. 2019
  • Over the past two years, Evans has mostly adapted to that patois, while nudging it further open with his own loopy, full-blooded style.
    — New York Times, 29 Oct. 2020
  • Should they be condemned to speak the patois of their family members, with no education in grammar?
    — Bryan A. Garner, National Review, 3 Sep. 2020
  • They weren’t meant for public consumption, and the people sitting in the audience all spoke the same fashion patois.
    — National Geographic, 7 Jan. 2020
  • There is pride in Cantonese, the patois of Hong Kong, rather than the Mandarin of the mainland.
    — New York Times, 30 June 2022
  • Newell lays it on a bit thick, his thick Caribbean patois verging into caricature at times.
    — Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 2 Dec. 2021
  • One complaint was Jar Jar’s accent, which some perceived as derived from Jamaican patois.
    — Carlos Aguilar, New York Times, 3 May 2024
  • You can be forgiven for not being aware of this particular patois, however; most records of its usage are a century or more old.
    — Frances Vinall, Washington Post, 2 June 2023
  • That means that this province, called Limon, has much more English spoken – in a Jamaican patois – than the rest of the country.
    — Marla Jo Fisher, Orange County Register, 10 Feb. 2017
  • In the patois of insurance, the winery will go bare into this year’s burning season, which experts predict to be especially fierce.
    — New York Times, 18 July 2021
  • Most of Levy's stories run fewer than 12 pages and feel like very long flash fiction, written in a voice dense with the chaotic patois of the internet.
    — Leland Cheuk, NPR, 14 May 2024
  • The ones whose regional patois still so closely mimics language and dialect rhythms from the communities that emerged throughout slavery.
    — Osayi Endolyn, New York Times, 17 May 2021
  • How one of the first bits of dialogue, an exchange between Bear and Elora, is spoken in a kind of intertribal patois.
    — David Treuer, The Atlantic, 1 Aug. 2022
  • One tale unfolds in Jamaican patois; another dips in and out of Black American idioms.
    — Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 29 Aug. 2022
  • The explosion of email, tweets and texting, with their patois and haiku-style snippets, has eroded what for centuries was a clear distinction between the written and the spoken.
    — Lynnley Browning, Newsweek, 28 Mar. 2015
  • The premise is that Emily Dickinson speaks in modern teen-age patois, scored to Billie Eilish.
    — Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker, 4 Dec. 2019
  • The premise is that Emily Dickinson speaks in modern teen-age patois, scored to Billie Eilish.
    — The New Yorker, 19 Mar. 2020
  • The thick patois of characters throughout the series may require some American viewers to use closed captioning.
    — Los Angeles Times, 28 Feb. 2021
  • That’s for sure when people speak patois, a vernacular version of English that’s based on a culture’s intonation.
    — Harriette Cole, Mercury News, 4 June 2026
  • Everyone spoke the Queen's English, but gradually the native patois has taken over.
    — Town & Country, 6 Dec. 2012
  • What cements their union is the news that Solo can speak—or, at any rate, gurgle—the language of the Wookiees, though it must be said that the patois is less charming on the human tongue.
    — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 4 June 2017
  • Lighter fare includes an interview with Tom Hanks’ son Chet, who went viral for spitting white-boy patois on the Emmys red carpet.
    — P.j. McCormick, Rolling Stone, 14 Sep. 2022

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