How to Use realist in a Sentence

realist

1 of 2 noun
  • Any realist would tell you Ukraine would fall.
    — Elizabeth Shackelford, Chicago Tribune, 12 June 2026
  • The guy was nothing if not a realist.
    — Zach Dean Outkick, FOXNews.com, 8 June 2026
  • The thing to watch will be who winds up in the top jobs, hardliners or realists.
    — Donald Heflin, The Conversation, 28 Feb. 2026
  • The thing to watch will be who winds up in the top jobs, hardliners or realists.
    — Donald Heflin, Fortune, 1 Mar. 2026
  • The realist recognizes this series has had two games that were toss-ups and one where the Knicks were just better, longer.
    — David Troy Outkick, FOXNews.com, 10 June 2026
  • Syd, bless her, as well as Ayo Edebiri, is the cautious realist in that partnership.
    — Jen Chaney, Vulture, 26 June 2026
  • But Ma has been deftly drawn as a canny realist and problem solver—not the kind of person to indulge in daydreams.
    — Tope Folarin, The Atlantic, 8 Nov. 2025
  • The character is described as playful but also a realist who’s well aware of society’s unspoken rules.
    — Rick Porter, HollywoodReporter, 8 Apr. 2026
  • Curry is the ultimate realist and the ultimate dreamer.
    — Sports Columnist, San Francisco Chronicle, 22 Feb. 2026
  • Linda’s an idealist and Norma’s a realist.
    — Trey Williams, HollywoodReporter, 14 Dec. 2025
  • For the realists in the rooms—perhaps joined by economists and accountants—2025’s wildfire season was anything but good news.
    — Tristan Bove, Fortune, 1 June 2026
  • The signature in the upper left-hand corner confirmed the artist was the American realist Ernest Wells.
    — Sarah D. Wire, USA Today, 24 May 2026
  • The setting for this two-hander is more abstract than usual for Hunter, who is one of the theater’s outstanding American realists.
    — Theater Critic, Los Angeles Times, 3 June 2026
  • The realist knows that Monday needs to swiftly be proven to be a bizarre anomaly if San Francisco wants to accomplish anything of worth this season.
    — Dieter Kurtenbach, Mercury News, 25 Nov. 2025
  • Welch was not a rabid anti-communist, just a realist who wanted to protect Fisher by ensuring this past association would not be used against him.
    — Kristen Monroe, Chicago Tribune, 17 Feb. 2026
  • But Shironitta adds that Takaichi, while seen as conservative and nationalistic, is also a realist.
    — Miranda Jeyaretnam, Time, 28 Oct. 2025
  • In San Jose, Cohen has developed a reputation as a principled realist who has pursued progress over purity.
    — Mercury News & East Bay Times Editorial Boards, Mercury News, 1 June 2026
  • But the American leaders who midwifed the UN as World War II was still raging were somber realists, not utopians.
    — Andreas Kluth, Mercury News, 26 Sep. 2025
  • The announcement comes just ahead of the COP30 conference in Brazil, where ‘energy realists’ are once again likely to push back against stricter climate goals.
    — Manal Albarakati, semafor.com, 7 Nov. 2025
  • The Regulation Sandbox There is a geopolitical dimension here that appeals to resource realists.
    — Güney Yıldız, Forbes.com, 27 Jan. 2026
  • Housing affordability is a cross-party concern, where expanding homestead protections can unite family advocates and market realists.
    — Eleanor Dearman, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 14 Feb. 2026
  • Since Capricorn is ruled by Saturn, the planet associated with responsibilities, boundaries and restrictions, those born under the sign are realists.
    — Olivia Munson, USA Today, 20 Dec. 2025
  • Murry corrupted and perverted and destroyed Katherine both as a person and a writer […] Her gifts were those of an intense realist, with a superb sense of ironic humour and fundamental cynicism.
    — Literary Hub, 17 Dec. 2025
  • Ever the geopolitical realist, the Chinese president will know Modi’s presence at his banquet was opportunistic at best, and doesn’t indicate the start of a beautiful friendship.
    — Bobby Ghosh, Time, 2 Sep. 2025
  • The other—sensitive, almost documentary-realist about the dynamics of modern parenting—deals with the fallout, as a community struggles to confront how such a nightmarish failure of safeguarding could have happened.
    — Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic, 4 Dec. 2025
  • By the late chapters, Daphne and her contemporaries, now old, seem to remember less about those days with Cecil than does the reader, who came through them recently—an inspired way of calling forth the novel-ness of the novel without breaking the realist’s line.
    — The New Yorker, New Yorker, 31 Dec. 2025
  • At her core, Hepburn was a child of war who identified with Anne Frank—a realist who faced the problems of the world head-on as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador.
    — Hadley Hall Meares, Vanity Fair, 15 May 2026
  • Before the publication of Bomarzo, he’d been considered a Gallicized realist who’d transplanted the Proustian mode into roman à clef studies of the Argentine criollo elite.
    — Literary Hub, 8 Aug. 2025

realist

2 of 2 adjective
  • It has been used in just about every realist novel since.
    — Literary Hub, 16 Mar. 2026
  • Is that a downer or just being a realist?
    — Carolyn Hax, Washington Post, 10 Mar. 2026
  • No realist power would’ve ever done that.
    — David Frum, The Atlantic, 8 Apr. 2026
  • This is not a magical realist novel, right?
    — Literary Hub, 4 Sep. 2025
  • This is a show that routinely breaks with its largely realist format in favor of flair and emotion.
    — Vulture, 2 May 2022
  • Chris came into the game as one of the most confident and realist players in the Circle.
    — Tamara Fuentes, Seventeen, 14 Jan. 2020
  • His Usnavi, a young bodega owner who had to grow up too fast, is half realist, half dreamer and all in for what life brings.
    — Matthew J. Palm, orlandosentinel.com, 5 Oct. 2021
  • For a long time, public sentiment seemed to be inching toward the latter, more realist view.
    — Zachary Siegel, The New Republic, 27 June 2023
  • Many films — even those in the realist genre — fail to present an authentic depiction of everyday life.
    — Ali Farahmand, IndieWire, 8 July 2025
  • The booth contained dozens of human-sized screens with eerily realist avatars creeping everyone out.
    — Popular Science, 9 Jan. 2020
  • In a state-centric realist model, that stance is against America’s interests and makes no sense.
    — Andreas Kluth, Mercury News, 10 Feb. 2026
  • This is a sugarless movie, with a grim, realist acknowledgment of a woman’s fate — of a poor, working woman’s fate.
    — Wesley Morris, New York Times, 30 Mar. 2020
  • His realist fiction could never arrive at a full understanding.
    — Max Chapnick, The Conversation, 16 Jan. 2025
  • More traditional are Freya Grand’s pair of realist nature scenes, which focus tightly on small areas of sea or earth.
    — Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, 3 Nov. 2023
  • Suddenly, unabashed genre flicks could be celebrated on the same level as social realist dramas.
    — Christopher Vourlias, Variety, 15 May 2026
  • Th project shows a vision of Arab Spain that is very realist, yet far more nuanced and more upbeat than most depictions, the two filmmakers said.
    — Liza Foreman, Variety, 15 Sep. 2022
  • Boulder’s Sarah McKenzie takes up the main space with her realist paintings of prisons and museums.
    — Ray Mark Rinaldi, Denver Post, 7 Apr. 2025
  • There is this other stream that doesn't get a lot of coverage in the media which is a more realist approach to foreign policy that does seek to have a different approach.
    — Fox News, 18 June 2018
  • The novel, as well as having strong horror elements and is a social realist tale, an institutional critique as much as anything.
    — John Hopewell, Variety, 27 Apr. 2026
  • She was given a role—but turned it down upon actually reading Hansberry’s realist drama, cowed by the challenge.
    — Hazlitt, 9 Aug. 2023
  • Steve fits into a broader push under Mensah to back socially realist, risk-taking British stories.
    — Scott Roxborough, HollywoodReporter, 7 Sep. 2025
  • Putting this part of the story in the mouth of an inebriated Frenchman seems nothing less than a crisis of confidence in the realist mode to depict anything at all.
    — Ryu Spaeth, Vulture, 4 June 2024
  • Few realist Democratic candidates for congressional seats wanted to run with Dean at the head of the ticket.
    — Victor Davis Hanson, The Mercury News, 8 Aug. 2019
  • His poetic liberties in a realist mode point back to one of his favorite predecessors, Gustave Courbet.
    — Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 1 June 2020
  • The lawyer in me is drawn to the social realist novel as a genre, but the seven year old protégé of Aunt Edwina cannot help but build from the speculative logics of myth.
    — Tochi Eze august 5, Literary Hub, 5 Aug. 2025
  • In recent elections, this fatigue may well have translated into a preference for candidates who have embraced a more realist approach to foreign affairs.
    — Dan Caldwell, Foreign Affairs, 13 Nov. 2024
  • What begins as realist fiction pivots with a gigantic metaphysical twist, asking big questions about what obligations a writer has to their characters.
    — Lorraine Berry, Los Angeles Times, 19 Apr. 2023
  • Doing so also gave him freedom to take on different roles - in samurai epics, realist dramas, crime thrillers, and even science fiction - and work with many different directors over the course of his career.
    — NPR, 12 Nov. 2025
  • All these anachronisms are at least a matter of inside baseball, if a hindrance to Baylin and Susman’s attempts to evoke the same textured, realist milieu as the Safdie brothers.
    — Alison Herman, Variety, 18 Sep. 2025
  • Prioritization is a realist strategy, and what keeps realists up at night is the threat of a rival great power controlling an economically vital part of the world.
    — Jennifer Lind, Foreign Affairs, 24 June 2025

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