How to Use slavish in a Sentence

slavish

adjective
  • He has been criticized for his slavish devotion to the rules.
  • Stay too slavish to the original and you’re accused of a money grab.
    — Nicole Sperling, HWD, 20 Dec. 2017
  • Trump, after all, was not supported these past few years by only his most slavish sycophants.
    — Susan B. Glasser, The New Yorker, 22 Apr. 2021
  • How slavish should subsequent sequels and spin-offs be to the originals?
    — Jake Coyle and Lindsey Bahr, San Francisco Chronicle, 5 June 2018
  • BioWare seemingly thought that sort of slavish devotion to the stylus was a great idea.
    — Earnest Cavalli, WIRED, 7 Oct. 2008
  • Second, many believe this slavish devotion to history to be deeply flawed.
    — Robert J. Spitzer, Time, 6 June 2023
  • Other shows that talk politics are slavish to the liberal point of view, to the point of being boring and predictable.
    — Chris Varias, Cincinnati.com, 1 May 2018
  • In fact, a slavish devotion to our devices has come to feel like a practical necessity.
    — Amanda Hess, New York Times, 18 Mar. 2020
  • But letting the neck of her white t-shirt peek through at the top tells us that this outfit was made with both style and comfort in mind, not a slavish devotion to trends.
    — Elizabeth Logan, Glamour, 27 Jan. 2026
  • Lotus argued that this slavish copying violated its copyrights, and the trial court agreed.
    — Timothy B. Lee, Ars Technica, 6 Oct. 2020
  • Trump’s ever-slavish Vice-President managed to mention him thirty-three times in his thirty-six-minute speech.
    — Susan B. Glasser, The New Yorker, 28 Aug. 2020
  • These are not slavish recreations; Caro has added her own touch to the scenes, slightly tweaking some, while others are more significantly altered.
    — Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 5 Sep. 2020
  • But from a certain angle, Incredibles 2 looks a little too slavish to creaky conventions.
    — Richard Lawson, HWD, 11 June 2018
  • Military regimes bolster their legitimacy by slavish devotion to the crown.
    — The Economist, 5 Sep. 2019
  • If this massive population is being made miserable by a slavish devotion to in-boxes and chat channels, then this adds up to a whole lot of global miserableness!
    — Cal Newport, The New Yorker, 26 Feb. 2021
  • People who climb upward by sacrificing their integrity to slavish subservience almost always fall on their faces eventually.
    — Robert B. Reich, Hartford Courant, 21 Aug. 2025
  • That point is not that Republican tax policy is motivated by a slavish devotion to the interests of rich people.
    — Ramesh Ponnuru, National Review, 17 Oct. 2017
  • After the script was poorly received by De Laurentiis, Herbert took one last stab at trying to pull it in a less lengthy/slavish direction.
    — Max Evry, WIRED, 4 Mar. 2024
  • Because slavish inferiority did not befit his spirit.
    — Ann Manov, Harpers Magazine, 23 June 2026
  • Too often musicians cover Dylan with such slavish devotion to the original recordings, their versions veer toward reverent karaoke.
    — Ken Capobianco, BostonGlobe.com, 10 May 2018
  • There are long periods where very little happens, which is covered up only slightly by their slavish devotion to expensive technology that shows real-time, county-by-county data.
    — Alex Shephard, The New Republic, 3 Nov. 2020
  • That his friend was Princess Lee Radziwill, a fixture of the high society to which Capote remained slavish, was naturally a major component.
    — Mark Peikert, Town & Country, 28 Jan. 2022
  • But if that earlier Haunted Mansion took liberties with the source material, 2023’s film is almost slavish to the ride’s lore.
    — Vulture, 31 July 2023
  • His mock recreation of a 1992 ski film, using all period equipment, is a time-warp masterpiece that makes explicit points about slavish commitment to contemporary styles.
    — Chuck Thompson, Popular Mechanics, 21 Feb. 2019
  • Brady sees these membership contributions as vital to sustaining not just the financial needs of local news but to avoid the slavish devotion to digital ad sales as a sole revenue stream with its race to the bottom need for clickbait content.
    — Howard Homonoff, Forbes, 10 Mar. 2021
  • The fact that it is now being retold in a slavish re-creation of a fairly recent film, complete with massive marketing tie-ins and a shameless confidence that people will pay to see basically the same movie again, is, yes, cynical.
    — Katey Rich, VanityFair.com, 20 Mar. 2017
  • True believers shaved their heads, wore overalls, and lived together at Synanon compounds, professing an almost slavish obedience to Dederich, no matter how brutal his methods.
    — Hillel Aron, Los Angeles Magazine, 23 Apr. 2018
  • Affleck plays Phil’s contradictions — the man’s simultaneous slavish devotion to the bottom line and obsession with Buddhism — as one of the film’s running jokes.
    — Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter, 18 Mar. 2023
  • Not a slavish recapitulation of classical tropes, but a recasting of them into a work that’s somehow weighty and lithe, inexorable and unexpected, eternal and American, all at once.
    — Tony Adler, Chicago Reader, 24 Jan. 2018
  • Meanwhile, a stylist has had to cancel his own honeymoon due to delays in the tour, indicating both slavish, life-altering devotion to the British pop star in her coterie, but also her obliviousness to such things going on.
    — Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire, 24 Jan. 2026

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