How to Use purgatorial in a Sentence

purgatorial

adjective
  • And like there's an end in sight to our purgatorial existence.
    — Leora Yashari, refinery29.com, 6 Nov. 2020
  • Dogs are, for some of us, a perfect balm for purgatorial anxieties.
    — Amanda Mull, The Atlantic, 29 July 2021
  • The dark, moody atmosphere and soulful crooning has an air of the purgatorial to it.
    — Joe Reid, Vulture, 10 Mar. 2026
  • Staring back at Ball was a proxy error notice, a gray message plastered against a screen of purgatorial white.
    — Benjamin Wofford, Vox, 25 Oct. 2018
  • The attempt failed, and since April, Venezuela has remained stuck in a purgatorial stalemate.
    — Michael J. Camilleri, Foreign Affairs, 3 Sep. 2019
  • There is no life or death here for Lynch’s protagonists, only an endless purgatorial loop.
    — Matt Zoller Seitz, Vulture, 16 Jan. 2025
  • Given how the episode starts with a fantasy, this special could entirely be Rue in a purgatorial state.
    — Marcus Jones, EW.com, 4 Dec. 2020
  • If Clyde’s is clearly figured as purgatorial, glimpses of both the divine and the ordinary lie just beyond.
    — Naveen Kumar, Variety, 23 Nov. 2021
  • Lopatin’s best songs build a space—uncanny, warped, almost purgatorial—in which various eras and ideas, both dead and alive, can speak to one another.
    — Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker, 25 Sep. 2023
  • The Captain’s solitary confinement was, in a sense, a form of purgatorial amnesty that kept him safe under Man’s watch.
    — Terry Nguyen, Vulture, 26 May 2024
  • The sculpture portrays the midcareer stage as lonely and purgatorial.
    — Emily Watlington, ARTnews.com, 11 Oct. 2024
  • But that policy did not apply to thousands of concerts that had been bumped from their original dates but had no new ones — leaving the money fans spent on those shows in a purgatorial state.
    — Ben Sisario, New York Times, 25 Apr. 2020
  • For Bran, these qualities neutralize the place into a purgatorial zone.
    — New York Times, 17 May 2022
  • The room was like any other these days, with its neutral bedding, uncomfortable bouclé lounge chair, and wood-veneer accent wall—tasteful, but purgatorial.
    — Darran Anderson, The Atlantic, 24 Aug. 2020
  • Celebration turns to silent despondency, as the movie’s rousing highs are replaced by a purgatorial limbo, as though time were standing still.
    — Siddhant Adlakha, Variety, 9 May 2024
  • The Detroit Tigers’ 108th game of the season had that purgatorial feeling.
    — Cody Stavenhagen, The Athletic, 29 July 2024
  • This isn’t to say that the Dreamers’ current purgatorial position is acceptable.
    — Eric Levitz, Daily Intelligencer, 22 Jan. 2018
  • Everyone can relate to a character waiting for a phone call, or a text, that feeling of being stuck in a purgatorial gap that won’t end until the other person has made contact.
    — Literary Hub, 10 June 2026
  • Much like the Kings themselves, Quick appears to be in a purgatorial transition phase, stuck somewhere between the prime and postmortem of his career.
    — Jack Harris, Los Angeles Times, 14 Oct. 2019
  • In the latter video, the singer, dancer and artist twigs also reaches upward toward a celestial, winged being before descending down a long pole into a purgatorial-like space.
    — Andrew R. Chow, Time, 29 Mar. 2021
  • Burroughs was an ethereal intermediary between here and the fiery beyond, pausing to give us the purgatorial skinny.
    — Alexander C. Kafka, Houston Chronicle, 29 June 2019
  • Mickey is racked with guilt over a fateful childhood mistake, and so his purgatorial existence, in which he is denied the pleasures of life and the closure of death, becomes a demented search for grace.
    — Justin Chang, The New Yorker, 28 Feb. 2025
  • Mendes, for all the tony respectability of his work (give or take a multiplex outing for James Bond), relishes the misery of purgatorial lives.
    — A.a. Dowd, Chron, 8 Dec. 2022
  • Viewed from an especially merciless or purgatorial angle, certain strands of my life are little more than histories of lo-fi mendacity.
    — James Parker, The Atlantic, 28 Oct. 2025
  • The purgatorial seating has a psychological effect on the service.
    — Bill Addison, latimes.com, 27 June 2019
  • Banshees resembles the purgatorial tribalism and ethnic discontent that Spike Lee gets away with.
    — Armond White, National Review, 23 Dec. 2022
  • Nothing less than radical, out-of-the-box thinking will suffice given their current, suffocating, purgatorial scenario.
    — Dieter Kurtenbach, Mercury News, 29 June 2026
  • Emotional confusion and a quest for escapism colored the contents of the album, which led into the purgatorial concepts of Dawn FM.
    — Larisha Paul, Rolling Stone, 4 Sep. 2024
  • Time may be the currency with which people are required to pay for their crimes, but as this gloomy two-hander confronts at every turn, the purgatorial nature of prison doesn’t excuse convicts from being subjected to its effects.
    — David Ehrlich, IndieWire, 25 Jan. 2026
  • The dust was high and the sun was low, but PillowTalk’s funky grooves attracted dancers at that purgatorial time of day when the energy lost after a day in the sun commingled with the urge to continue dancing.
    — Morena Duwe, Billboard, 7 Oct. 2019

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

Last Updated: