How to Use premodern in a Sentence

premodern

adjective
  • This was a type of governance that was widely practiced in premodern East Asia.
    — Stephanie Balkwill, The Conversation, 17 Mar. 2025
  • Embedded in the world of the living, premodern ghosts were almost extended kin.
    — Tithi Bhattacharya / Made By History, TIME, 31 Oct. 2024
  • Americans especially came to think of such events as things of the past—relics from the time of tenement living and premodern medicine.
    — Larry Brilliant, Foreign Affairs, 20 Dec. 2022
  • In a world with less pollution, plants and trees will become more dominant drivers of cloud formation, an echo of the premodern world.
    — WIRED, 29 Sep. 2023
  • Throughout premodern Europe, this is how she was known—the figure in the cloak with a stool on her back, walking to houses at all hours, day and night.
    — Literary Hub, 16 June 2026
  • Sea travel was the fastest, safest, and cheapest way to move people and goods in the premodern world, costing about a fifth of the price of equivalent land transport.
    — William Dalrymple, The New York Review of Books, 1 Dec. 2022
  • And if most premodern empires are unthinkable without cavalry, climate could help in more direct ways, too.
    — Ben Ehrenreich, The New Republic, 10 May 2023
  • Today, just as in premodern Christmases, overturning norms during this special time helps to strengthen those same norms for the rest of the year.
    — Maria Sachiko Cecire, Smithsonian Magazine, 23 Dec. 2020
  • Many premodern societies were patriarchal and violent, but Italy is in many ways unique.
    — Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager, The Conversation, 7 Mar. 2024
  • In the premodern world, there were also several jobs that modern women have since jettisoned thanks to modern conveniences.
    — Time, 20 Jan. 2023
  • The bushi were a 20th century invention — a way to turn premodern warriors into role models for a new national culture.
    — Reid McCarter, Washington Post, 14 Aug. 2020
  • Your next book is largely about premodern European women’s relationships with their bodies.
    — Chandler Fritz, The New York Review of Books, 21 Mar. 2026
  • The show was slammed by medical experts, as a premodern birth process is associated with vastly higher infant mortality rates.
    — Ew Staff Updated, EW.com, 29 Nov. 2023
  • For a long time, influenced by anthropologists, historians of premodern Europe tried to make these strange things make perfect sense.
    — Chandler Fritz, The New York Review of Books, 21 Mar. 2026
  • Over time, hostility to modern ideas became the default position of an institution that cleaved to an image of itself as premodern and unchanging.
    — Paul Elie, The Atlantic, 11 Dec. 2022
  • For champions of progress, who often cite painless dentistry as the summum bonum, the surgery of the premodern period is nothing but a vile species of Grand Guignol.
    — Will Self, Harper’s Magazine , 28 Sep. 2022
  • To know if the crops would thrive this season or what the king’s death portended, premodern people turned to the subconscious as a tool for seeing beyond what was immediately accessible to them.
    — Gal Beckerman, The Atlantic, 23 Apr. 2025
  • The softer premodern methods of soaking up floods, like oyster beds and wetlands, would never be able to absorb a major surge in the compact space left available in today’s New York.
    — Christopher Bonanos, Curbed, 30 Oct. 2023
  • Not in crushing debt, but in rejecting American culture’s pervasive backward slide into premodern flimflam.
    — Hillary Busis, Vanity Fair, 13 Feb. 2026
  • Nature’s Pharmacopoeia Of course, these premodern observations were folk knowledge, not formal science.
    — Adrienne Mayor, Discover Magazine, 28 May 2024
  • The thing about Marcus’s brand of Stoicism that struck me during my first reading was its conspicuously premodern impracticality.
    — Tom Bissell, Harper’s Magazine , 10 Apr. 2023
  • For this reason, premodern astrology was closely connected to astronomy.
    — Michelle Aroney and David Zeitlyn, Smithsonian Magazine, 2 Jan. 2025
  • In recent years, LiDAR scans have helped improve researchers’ understanding of people’s lives in premodern cities and settlements.
    — Livia Gershon, Smithsonian Magazine, 12 May 2021
  • The burial site, and particularly the crown and other fineries interred with the woman, hinted at a premodern European culture in which women might have held considerable power.
    — New York Times, 17 Nov. 2021
  • Just weeks after announcing a plan (or at least the preparative study of a plan) to reconstruct Park Avenue in its premodern, superior form, the city has just revealed a major makeover for Fifth.
    — Christopher Bonanos, Curbed, 17 Oct. 2024
  • For historians interested in the lives of premodern women in particular, the problem intensifies.
    — Michelle Weber, Longreads, 15 Nov. 2024
  • New acquisitions are constantly added, and the museum now showcases the richness of premodern Asian arts and the evolving visual cultures of Asia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
    — Yola Robert, Forbes.com, 7 June 2025
  • Yet that is a nonissue entirely of the authors’ own making, caused by their insistence on an anachronistically maximalist definition of the state that is not normally applied to premodern societies.
    — Walter Scheidel, Foreign Affairs, 19 Apr. 2022
  • One of the central propositions advanced by the late Qing thinkers was that China needed not merely to find a way out of the crisis facing China at that time but also to embed the solution in premodern Chinese cultural forms.
    — Rana Mitter, Foreign Affairs, 20 Feb. 2024
  • The history of premodern Southeast Asia, where small kingdoms competed and traded without coming under the dominion of China or India, suggests a different model.
    — JSTOR Daily, 5 Nov. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'premodern.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: