How to Use riven in a Sentence

riven

adjective
  • Its leaves were glossy and dark green, its bark riven like a mountain range seen from above.
    — Zoë Schlanger, The Atlantic, 23 Oct. 2023
  • Heroism, riven with risk, is available only to those who take action.
    — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 22 Dec. 2023
  • These moves have further inflamed an already deeply riven country and drawn the largest protests in over a decade.
    — Ilan Ben Zion, Anchorage Daily News, 3 Mar. 2023
  • The method yields images that are streaked and cracked, with surfaces that are alternately riven and raised.
    — Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, 20 Oct. 2023
  • This elite is riven with divisions and can struggle to reach consensus.
    — Ali Reza Eshraghi, Foreign Affairs, 24 May 2023
  • This riven Martian arctic was a mystery to scientists for over forty years.
    — Joseph Calamia, Discover Magazine, 19 Nov. 2019
  • The collective past and our powerful feelings about it could be the key to healing the riven nation.
    — Michael Morris, TIME, 27 Nov. 2024
  • And in this riven piece of steel – and the nearly 500 others like it all across the country – the violence of that day lives on.
    — CBS News, 5 Sep. 2021
  • And then a truck arrived to outfit the unit, loaded with rifles that were old and rusty, and body armor that was dirty and sometimes riven with bullet holes.
    — Scott Peterson, The Christian Science Monitor, 12 Aug. 2024
  • Their journey through a land riven by conflict in search of Arthur’s successor will reveal the country’s bloody origins.
    — Lorraine Berry, Los Angeles Times, 15 May 2024
  • As commencement season comes to a close, many campuses remain riven by the Israel-Hamas war.
    — Jonathan Krasner, The Conversation, 16 June 2025
  • Images shared on social media, and captured by journalists, show entire neighborhoods riven by the surging flood.
    — Louisa Loveluck, Washington Post, 12 Sep. 2023
  • The ability to choose effective players and get the most from them explains how a team riven with injuries has still reached the World Series.
    — Nicholas Dawidoff, The New Yorker, 26 Oct. 2024
  • In a country riven by deep inequalities, however, opportunity for some came at a loss for others.
    — Literary Hub, 29 Sep. 2025
  • The sandstone here is riven with streaks and ribbons of pastel, rust, and chalk—dull pinks, reds, and oranges that glow in the noonday sun, and only grow more dramatic as the light disappears.
    — Hazlitt, 2 Aug. 2023
  • The Democrats are nearly three weeks removed from their first popular vote defeat in a presidential contest in two decades and are riven about how to avoid a similar defeat in four years.
    — Max Thornberry, Washington Examiner - Political News and Conservative Analysis About Congress, the President, and the Federal Government, 24 Nov. 2024
  • The fall-winter holiday season harks back to an America that, while often riven and contentious, was always rooted in man's permanent sources of meaning.
    — MSNBC Newsweek, 27 Nov. 2025
  • Armies, after all, are not just the sum of their personnel and their equipment; they can be riven with ethnic, racial, class, and other social divisions that invariably shape their capacity to fight.
    — Jason Lyall, Foreign Affairs, 22 July 2022
  • The federal government is shuttered for a second day, with Democrats and Republicans riven over healthcare funding.
    — Daniel De Visé, USA Today, 2 Oct. 2025
  • Few area residents would ever guess that another culture thrived here for thousands of years amid a landscape of oak and walnut woodlands riven with waterways teeming with steelhead trout and prowled by wolves and grizzly bears.
    — Louis Sahagún, Los Angeles Times, 9 Oct. 2023
  • When the burgeoning military battle is over, the movement may be critical to rebuilding a country riven by years of political schisms, already overwhelmed by grief and the demands of war.
    — Steve Hendrix, Washington Post, 24 Oct. 2023
  • Despite outward shows of unity, Cuba’s Communist Party is riven with factions that are frequently reported to be at odds.
    — Jon Lee Anderson, New Yorker, 29 Sep. 2025
  • Nowhere is the riven soul of industrial capitalism on starker display than in Birmingham, Alabama.
    — Robert Kunzig, National Geographic, 13 Oct. 2020
  • His reckless prewar policy of dividing Israelis made the country vulnerable, tempting Iran’s allies to strike at a riven society.
    — Aluf Benn, Foreign Affairs, 7 Feb. 2024
  • Nearly a century later, Iraq remained too riven with ethnic and sectarian frictions to support anything resembling a Western-style democracy.
    — Loren Thompson, Forbes, 14 Apr. 2022
  • Written in the flush of a new friendship with co-producer, engineer, and musician Sam Weber, the album unspools a suite of folk miniatures riven with discursive melodies as evocative as the cultural ephemera dotted through the lyrics.
    — Nina Corcoran, Pitchfork, 29 Aug. 2025
  • And when some of the dominant brokers are Koreans selling mostly to fellow Koreans — on courses designed to cater to all stripes of Angelenos — the controversy is riven with race and class politics.
    — Matt Hamilton, Los Angeles Times, 16 Mar. 2024
  • Policymakers and analysts worry that the future will be riven with divisions, with countries separated into hostile, competitive blocs and geopolitics becoming a zero-sum game.
    — Bilahari Kausikan, Foreign Affairs, 11 Apr. 2023
  • Ultimately, American Gun is an indictment on a paranoid, apocalyptic country, riven with people who cannot help but see their neighbors, as well as their own government, as perpetual threats that must be met with deadly force.
    — Colin Dickey, The New Republic, 23 Oct. 2023
  • Nearly every institution—campuses, synagogues, families—seemed riven by internal conflict.
    — Andrew Marantz, The New Yorker, 2 Nov. 2023

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