How to Use shrew in a Sentence

shrew

noun
  • Rip Van Winkle went off into the mountains to escape his wife, a shrew who made his life miserable.
  • The cub had pulled the shrew out of the sand and had been knocking it around like a ball.
    — Cecilia Rodriguez, Forbes, 28 Nov. 2023
  • The shrew-rat is just a few inches long, with small eyes, large ears, and a soft coat.
    — Ed Yong, Discover Magazine, 21 Aug. 2012
  • The shrew is one of these mammals, according to the study.
    — Irene Wright, Miami Herald, 27 Aug. 2025
  • Exactly how a shrew shrinks its brain is still something of a head-scratcher.
    — Douglas Quenqua, New York Times, 23 Oct. 2017
  • No one likes to get dumped, but Sarah is no shrew, and certainly not a villain.
    — Tom Philip, GQ, 11 Mar. 2018
  • Bill Clinton got to come out looking like a cool guy, Hillary looked like a shrew.
    — ELLE, 11 Apr. 2022
  • See page 8 to order a shrew for $29, plus shipping and handling.
    — Jeff Wilson, Outdoor Life, 11 Mar. 2026
  • Because for the most part, Caroline comes off as a rigid uptight shrew.
    — Lisa Depaulo, HollywoodReporter, 27 Feb. 2026
  • The whale is a hundred million times bigger than a shrew, but its heart rate is just a hundred times slower.
    — Veronique Greenwood, Discover Magazine, 27 Sep. 2012
  • The cast of the show includes Kate (the shrew), played by Amanda Stevens.
    — Rick Mauch, star-telegram.com, 2 May 2017
  • As new vegetation takes root, deer mice, voles, shrews, and chipmunks move in for the harvest.
    — Brian Payton, Smithsonian, 9 Feb. 2018
  • In eastern China, the Langya virus may have jumped from the white-toothed shrew to humans.
    — Kent Sepkowitz, CNN, 17 Aug. 2022
  • An angry woman is no more than a hysteric, a shrew, a person to be punished.
    — Elizabeth Gulino, refinery29.com, 22 Nov. 2023
  • In the case of the pygmy shrew, the only scraps the researchers found after three days were inedible fur, bone and skin.
    — Jack Tamisiea, Scientific American, 16 Mar. 2023
  • This shrew-like animal is one of the very few venomous mammals that exist today.
    — WIRED, 28 Feb. 2023
  • The tiny bodies of weasels, shrews and bats burn energy so fast that skipping even one meal can mean starvation.
    — Leonie Baier, The Conversation, 27 Feb. 2026
  • The shrew weighs just 3 grams, somewhere between the weight of a penny and a quarter, researchers said.
    — Irene Wright, Miami Herald, 27 Aug. 2025
  • Pat’s the kind of person most filmmakers would turn into a shrew, or shallow self-deceiver.
    — Ann Hornaday, Washington Post, 3 Oct. 2023
  • The 2025 list of extinctions includes a bird, a shrew and a species of snail, among others.
    — Doyle Rice, USA Today, 18 Oct. 2025
  • One of the new species is a flightless behemoth, weighing as much as a shrew, and carries big spines for defense on its thorax.
    — Piotr Naskrecki, National Geographic, 25 Apr. 2019
  • The shrew could survive on insects, burrow away from the heat, and had fur to warm itself during the freezing decade that followed.
    — Cody Cassidy, Wired, 9 Apr. 2021
  • One of the earliest mammals was the mouse-sized Morganucodon, which looked something like a shrew.
    — Riley Black, Discover Magazine, 29 Sep. 2022
  • Though married to a terrible shrew, a man tries to figure out a way to be with his childhood sweetheart, who has just moved back into town.
    — Los Angeles Times, 13 Sep. 2019
  • These are important tools used for both feeding and building their dens and digging for other menu items such as mice, gophers, voles and shrews.
    — Ernie Cowan, San Diego Union-Tribune, 7 June 2026
  • That difference of 40 degrees is significant in the life of voles and shrews and insects and plants.
    — Anchorage Daily News, 12 Oct. 2019
  • Her mother and her equally nameless aunts are voiceless bystanders at best, screeching shrews bent on making the girl conform at any cost at worst.
    — Boyd Van Hoeij, The Hollywood Reporter, 25 Sep. 2017
  • The elephant shrew has been rediscovered in Africa after 50 years.
    — Brett Harman, CNN, 21 Aug. 2020
  • Some creatures — like mice, shrews, and voles — spend most of their time under the snow, in subnivean tunnels in the layer between the ground and the snowpack.
    — Sofia Quaglia, Discover Magazine, 6 Dec. 2023
  • But what about the Nimba otter shrew, the Cuban greater funnel-eared bat or other threatened yet obscure species?
    — Smithsonian, 28 June 2017

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

Last Updated: