How to Use sickle in a Sentence

sickle

1 of 2 noun
  • Stars push through dense black one by one, and then comes the thinnest sickle moon.
    — Paula McLain, Town & Country, 2 Sep. 2015
  • Two guns were drawn beneath a sickle moon.
    — Stephen Humphries, Christian Science Monitor, 10 Oct. 2025
  • Four other bodies were found with sickles strewn across their throats.
    — Joshua Rapp Learn, Smithsonian, 28 Oct. 2017
  • The county jail, where my sickle-cell patient had been held, is one.
    — Ricardo Nuila, The New Yorker, 26 June 2020
  • Simply grab the grass with one hand and hold the sickle in the other to slice through.
    — Laura Daily, Washington Post, 28 Feb. 2023
  • Troodontids are bird-like predators that have sickle-like claws.
    — USA TODAY, 19 July 2019
  • Old-timers used to simply pull plants out by the roots and cut grasses by sickle and scythe.
    — Cain Burdeau, Fox News, 19 June 2018
  • These sickle cells die off sooner than healthy red blood cells, causing anemia.
    — Ted W. Love, STAT, 17 July 2021
  • The knife is curved, an unusual find for the area and the time, looking more like a sickle.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 15 Oct. 2019
  • The red hammer-and-sickle flag was pulled down from the Kremlin for the last time.
    — Fred Weir, The Christian Science Monitor, 31 Aug. 2022
  • These new shears, shovels and sickles don’t just appeal for their lovely curves.
    — wsj.com, 6 Apr. 2023
  • Bluebird approached her to help design its sickle-cell trial.
    — Dhruv Khullar, The New Yorker, 22 Mar. 2022
  • So the method here is to co-opt the hysterical semiotics of alt-righters for sickle supremacy.
    — Kieran Press-Reynolds, Pitchfork, 24 Oct. 2025
  • Blood cells from several species of deer also sickle, but scientists don’t know what prompts the change.
    — Mitch Leslie, Science | AAAS, 18 Dec. 2017
  • Soon, Vorst was helping cut grass behind the building with a handheld sickle.
    — San Diego Union-Tribune, 27 Sep. 2019
  • Aliyana has sickle beta plus thalassemia, a form that is often considered milder.
    — Cassie Owens, Philly.com, 17 May 2018
  • Zaffina hurled something the officer thought was an axe or sickle.
    — Teri Figueroa, San Diego Union-Tribune, 18 Dec. 2020
  • Anti-Fufeng signs, including hammer-and-sickle flags, popped up in yards.
    — New York Times, 17 July 2022
  • These are often descended from field tools, such as sickles and machete-like tools that were designed to do work on farms and in forests.
    — Tim MacWelch, Outdoor Life, 27 Jan. 2020
  • For Nazaneen, exposure to cold or a cut can trigger a sickle-cell crisis.
    — Eric Branch, SFChronicle.com, 14 Jan. 2020
  • Williams said, to her knowledge, no one in the family had ever been told that Phaneese had sickle cell trait.
    — Deanna Boyd, star-telegram.com, 31 May 2017
  • Amber, 20, has a dream of opening a clinic to help people with sickle cell anemia.
    — Ellen McGirt, Fortune, 10 Aug. 2017
  • Gene editing to remove sickle-cell disease can cost $1 million a treatment.
    — Andy Kessler, WSJ, 22 Jan. 2023
  • In the disease state, the blood cells are sickle-shaped instead of round, leading to stabs of pain and eventual organ damage.
    — Jeff Wheelwright, Discover Magazine, 2 May 2016
  • On the way out of town, a monument with a Cyrillic inscription and a star, hammer, and sickle caught my eye.
    — Sigrid MacRae, Harper's Magazine, 16 Mar. 2021
  • Like its raptor relatives, the dinosaur also featured a large, sickle-like claw on its second toe.
    — Mrigakshi Dixit, Interesting Engineering, 28 May 2026
  • The group of tourists, dressed in replica Red Army costumes, stood in front of a red hammer-and-sickle billboard.
    — New York Times, 25 June 2021
  • The curved blade of the bronze knife, with structural reinforcement on the back side, looks as if someone recycled a sickle to make it.
    — Kiona N. Smith, Ars Technica, 18 Oct. 2019
  • For a child to be born with the condition, both parents must carry a sickle-cell gene, which is passed from one generation to the next.
    — Aisha Salaudeen, CNN, 10 July 2019
  • Those with the disease may suffer severe pain caused when sickle cells get stuck in small blood vessels and block the flow of blood and oxygen to organs in the body.
    — Mary Lynn Smith, Star Tribune, 1 Dec. 2020

sickle

2 of 2 adjective
  • And anything that puts strain on your body can cause a sickle-cell pain crisis.
    — Health.com, 1 July 2020
  • The hammer and sickle tattoo on their butt is exactly at my eye level.
    — Cassidy George, Rolling Stone, 22 Feb. 2023
  • In the trailer, Law sports a long, frizzy gray wig and a furry mustache while wielding the villain’s signature sickle.
    — Los Angeles Times, 2 Mar. 2023
  • In other words, sickle probes (those pointy metal things used to, yep, probe your mouth for cavities) and syringes shouldn’t just be lying out on the counter or metal tray.
    — Jenna Ryu, SELF, 19 Sep. 2023
  • Thousands of rural Nepalis joined their ranks, vowing to kill millions and hoist the hammer and sickle atop Chomolungma.
    — Sean Williams, Harper's Magazine, 11 Sep. 2023
  • Eight percent of Black people in this country have sickle trait, which is a benign medical condition that rarely causes any symptoms, let alone death.
    — Michael Ruiz, Fox News, 22 Nov. 2024
  • The same people who find the Nazi swastika repulsive are happy to wear the hammer and sickle on a T-shirt, hat, or military belt buckle.
    — Andrew Nagorski, Foreign Affairs, 30 Nov. 2012
  • In the first cycle, Rodriguez's doctors were able to collect 21 viable embryos — 10 of them had sickle disease.
    — Zoey Lyttle, People.com, 27 Jan. 2025
  • Cells with this kind of hemoglobin resist sickling—an explanation for why newborns with the illness do not experience sickle crises.
    — Maryn McKenna, Scientific American, 17 Sep. 2024
  • The announcement is a landmark in the treatment of sickle cell disease, a devastating condition in which red blood cells deform into a sickle shape and clog up blood vessels.
    — Beth Mole, Ars Technica, 8 Dec. 2023
  • The defect causes red blood cells in affected people to be sickle, or crescent shaped instead of disc shaped as normal, limiting the cells’ ability to carry oxygen.
    — Victoria Forster, Forbes, 15 Mar. 2025
  • Those misshapen hemoglobin proteins stick together in people with sickle cell, distorting the shape of red blood cells from a round shape to a sickle one that cannot flow through our blood vessels as easily.
    — Janice Blanchard, Scientific American, 18 Dec. 2023
  • The faulty gene causes blood cells to become misshapen into a characteristic crescent or sickle shape that can slow or halt blood flow, damaging tissues and leaving patients in extreme pain.
    — Angelica Peebles, BostonGlobe.com, 29 Mar. 2023
  • In Boston in those days, a case like this was a rarity; there were lengthy discussions about the various strains of malaria, and how sickle-cell mutations could mitigate the disease.
    — Jerome Groopman, The New Yorker, 5 Dec. 2022
  • The form of hemoglobin that babies make at birth, called fetal hemoglobin (HbF), isn’t affected by the sickle mutation.
    — Sara Reardon, Scientific American, 17 Sep. 2024
  • Montefiore Medical Center is a hospital system in New York that cares for large numbers of patients with sickle-cell disease.
    — Dhruv Khullar, The New Yorker, 22 Mar. 2022
  • Now, Vertex will take over that role for the sickle-cell treatment, on a global basis — a decision made in large part because the company already has a large-scale manufacturing and sales network in place.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 20 Apr. 2021
  • The sickle, the padlock and certain types of wood found at the grave site were all believed at the time to hold magical properties protecting against vampires, according to the Nicolaus Copernicus team.
    — Reuters, NBC News, 31 Oct. 2024
  • The mutation results in abnormal hemoglobin, which causes red blood cells to curve into a characteristic sickle shape and to become stiff and sticky; ultimately the sickled cells fail to deliver oxygen efficiently to tissues throughout the body.
    — Lauren Gravitz, Scientific American, 17 Sep. 2024
  • Other companies such as Agios Pharmaceuticals and Fulcrum Therapeutics are developing new experimental treatments for sickle disease.
    — Annika Kim Constantino,ashley Capoot, CNBC, 1 Oct. 2024

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

Last Updated: