How to Use prickly in a Sentence

prickly

adjective
  • The plant's leaves are prickly.
  • Bromelias — prickly and shiny and smooth.
    — Sofía Pereda, USA Today, 13 Oct. 2025
  • There are less prickly pieces of loose fur to stick to your clothes.
    — Lauren Palmer, Curbed, 15 June 2018
  • What can the rest of us learn from the prickly people in the world?
    — Suzy Exposito, Vogue, 26 Mar. 2024
  • These two adults have a prickly chemistry.
    — Judy Berman, Time, 26 Dec. 2025
  • Saguaros, the prickly gift suggests, are a guy's best friend.
    — Mary Schmich, chicagotribune.com, 14 Sep. 2017
  • Heat tends to make the rash much worse and the skin starts to become prickly.
    — Jacqueline Andriakos, SELF, 14 May 2018
  • The big cat was perched on a tall, prickly cactus, but didn't seem to mind the spikes.
    — Caitlin O'Kane, CBS News, 19 June 2018
  • Now that same clout has caught the kingdom in a prickly dilemma.
    — Ahmed Al Omran, WSJ, 30 Jan. 2017
  • Put on a pair of gloves to protect your hands from prickly tree branches.
    — Rabekah Henderson, Southern Living, 30 Nov. 2024
  • Big yellow orbs still cling to a prickly maze of vines that has mostly died.
    — Tess Taylor, CNN, 30 Oct. 2021
  • The gray sort of maybe sometimes prickly area in between.
    — Mike Ryan, IndieWire, 20 Nov. 2025
  • High will demonstrate how to care for, gather and cook prickly pears.
    — Jeanette Marantos, Los Angeles Times, 7 Oct. 2021
  • My skin felt prickly at first, sweaty underneath a heavy sweater.
    — Sarah Betancourt, Longreads, 30 Mar. 2018
  • Field’s Tova is a prickly sort.
    — ABC News, 7 May 2026
  • Electric blues, reds and purples of prickly urchins, sea stars and an anemones.
    — Outside Online, 26 June 2024
  • Now 2 weeks old, zoo staff said the prickly little one is doing well.
    — From Usa Today Network and Wire Reports, USA TODAY, 26 Jan. 2022
  • All squooshed down there into that prickly smell of hay and just that clear blue sky to look up at and think about.
    — David Searcy, Harpers Magazine, 30 Dec. 2025
  • Pitch-tipping can be a prickly topic.
    — Matt Kawahara, Houston Chronicle, 21 Feb. 2026
  • Our band, too, found ourselves on a prickly path to one of the most revered venues in the country.
    — Ryan Miller, The Atlantic, 10 Apr. 2025
  • Somebody has a nest on the ground here, and somebody is pretty prickly about it.
    — Murr Brewster, The Christian Science Monitor, 31 May 2017
  • Rose stored over the winter can be prickly — sorry — to get going again.
    — Jeff Lowenfels, Anchorage Daily News, 25 Feb. 2021
  • Mari's own sense of guilt was what fueled a lot of what people perceived as prickly in her.
    — Anne Cohen, refinery29.com, 16 Mar. 2020
  • But the driver is a prickly pill who won’t even call his sister by her rechristened nun name.
    — Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 6 Sep. 2021
  • The raw meat, the subtle fat, the prickly acidities of the sauce, the pure flavor.
    — Bill Buford, The New Yorker, 17 Dec. 2020
  • Gehry then pulled out a pair of scissors, cutting up a pricklier shape, like a strange crown.
    — Adriane Quinlan, Curbed, 12 Dec. 2025
  • But who will get the best of the prickly Putin-Macron courtship remains to be seen.
    — Henry Meyer, Bloomberg.com, 5 July 2017
  • Look, read the labels, mull over the prickly unanswered questions many of the pieces leave you with.
    — New York Times, 10 Feb. 2022
  • Keep an eye out for Jeffrey pines, which will have deeply furrowed bark and round prickly cones.
    — Jaclyn Cosgrove, Los Angeles Times, 29 Jan. 2026
  • To start your prep, the first tool to grab is a pair of kitchen shears, which makes snipping the prickly tips of the leaves a breeze.
    — Claire Perez, Sun-Sentinel.com, 10 Mar. 2018

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