How to Use piety in a Sentence

piety

noun
  • He was admired for his extreme piety.
  • Her lack of piety was a joy to behold.
    — Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone, 7 Oct. 2025
  • That one makes a great show of piety, said the nun in my ear.
    — Emma Donoghue, The Atlantic, 12 May 2020
  • So spare me the piety to the old postseason.
    — Scott Dochterman, New York Times, 1 June 2026
  • But the display of piety has done little to mask that the army chief has much to atone for.
    — New York Times, 2 Feb. 2021
  • There's little piety among those running the mines that are the main source of income.
    — Fernando Vergara, Star Tribune, 23 Apr. 2021
  • To find answers means more truth, less filial piety, and God knows how much more time.
    — Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker, 30 May 2022
  • Trump has great timing and an unerring sense of how to cut through the pre-fab pieties of diplomacy.
    — Christine M. Flowers, Philly.com, 21 Sep. 2017
  • The price of piety must be paid for protection — gotta love Catholic dogma.
    — Brooke Knisley, Vulture, 24 Mar. 2024
  • Trump’s piety, of course, is suspect, while Bush is a true believer.
    — Sarah Jones, The New Republic, 15 Mar. 2018
  • Eilish’s pop-song tantrums and Keys’s false piety give music the power to keep us apart.
    — Armond White, National Review, 27 Jan. 2020
  • And how a man who preached piety became the cause of unabashed revelry is anyone’s guess.
    — Los Angeles Daily News, The Mercury News, 17 Mar. 2017
  • Offences include even the most innocuous forms of piety, such as sporting long beards.
    — The Economist, 5 Mar. 2020
  • Yet if the uplifting side of the addiction drama can be one of its pieties, in this case it feels earned.
    — Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 22 Mar. 2023
  • Laws require all women to at least wear a headscarf, or hijab, to cover their hair as a sign of piety.
    — Jon Gambrell and Mike Corder, The Christian Science Monitor, 6 Oct. 2023
  • The film is propelled by liberal pieties that are now outdated.
    — Armond White, National Review, 26 Apr. 2024
  • Besides water control, they've been said to ward off evil and to frighten passers-by into piety.
    — CBS News, 27 Oct. 2019
  • That’s a serious debit in a movie that is, at least sometimes, about a figure of renowned deep piety.
    — Dennis Harvey, Variety, 2 June 2023
  • The poor were thought to be the regime’s last bastion of power, tied to theocracy by piety and the welfare state.
    — Reuel Marc Gerecht and, WSJ, 11 June 2018
  • Well, the neighborhood’s long-standing liberal pieties are put to the test.
    — airmail.news, 14 Sep. 2024
  • The writing dances on a knife-edge as religious piety and saintly delusion rub elbows.
    — Craig Jenkins, Vulture, 7 Nov. 2025
  • Paying one’s respects to the past, through memorialization of some kind, is an act of piety.
    — Washington Post, 4 Mar. 2022
  • It’s regarded as an act of worship to attain piety and one of submission to God.
    — Mariam Fam, Los Angeles Times, 17 Feb. 2026
  • Filial piety, the act of honoring and caring for one’s elders, is a virtue deeply rooted in my culture.
    — Venus Wong, Travel + Leisure, 5 Apr. 2026
  • But Buchdahl’s piety is precisely the source of his politics.
    — New York Times, 2 Nov. 2021
  • To be a nation founded on an ideal makes our love of country a more vital force than any instinctive pieties of blood and soil.
    — Ann Manov, Harpers Magazine, 23 June 2026
  • The Virgin of Kings, dressed in orchid pink, gazed down at this scene of historical piety.
    — Aatish Taseer Richard Mosse, New York Times, 3 Nov. 2022
  • The region’s piety, Dutch roots and beer culture provide fertile soil for these gatherings to grow.
    — David De Jong, WSJ, 22 Oct. 2020
  • Hollywood and the Republican right have clashed for years over the morals of the silver screen and the piety of the steeple.
    — Jeffrey Fleishman, latimes.com, 23 June 2019
  • Throughout the conference, Rohr dished out a series of barbs aimed at Christian piety.
    — Fred Bahnson, Harpers Magazine, 5 Jan. 2021

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