How to Use so-called in a Sentence

so-called

adjective
  • But that is not about being so-called normal or not normal.
    — ABC News, 24 Aug. 2025
  • The females can lay eggs in any warm-blooded animal, which then hatch, unleashing hundreds of screwworm larvae, so-called because of their sharp mouths and their burrowing being compared to the motion of a screw.
    — Patrick Smith, NBC news, 25 Aug. 2025
  • The park will be built on an empty stretch along Texas 4 near the Starbase office and so-called Starfactory, where the company builds Starship rockets.
    — Brandon Lingle, San Antonio Express-News, 17 Feb. 2026
  • Saba, Lesser Antilles Spanning only five square miles, Saba is the most diminutive of the Lesser Antilles, so-called for their size.
    — Kristin Braswell, AFAR Media, 14 Aug. 2025
  • The hope is that the technology used in the ‘drop-in’ sustainable fuels – so-called because they can be dropped into any internal combustion engine – can transfer to the broader automotive industry.
    — Luke Smith, New York Times, 30 Jan. 2026
  • It is set at an elite preparatory school to groom future wives, made up of daughters of Commanders, many of whom have been taken away from their birth parents, and so-called Pearl Girls, recruited from outside of Gilead.
    — Yvonne Villarreal, Los Angeles Times, 8 Apr. 2026
  • And Busch, the once-precocious-then-dominant-and-now-so-called-aging-giant of NASCAR, is laughing through his frustration.
    — Alex Zietlow, Charlotte Observer, 22 May 2026
  • No, the Rubber City—so-called because of the factories established there by Goodrich, Firestone, General Tire, and Goodyear—had never seen anything like this.
    — Chris Stirewalt, The Hill, 12 Sep. 2025
  • Jonathan Nackstrand | Afp | Getty Images The discovery of the so-called Per Geijer deposit sits in close proximity to the world’s largest underground iron ore mine.
    — Sam Meredith, CNBC, 28 Nov. 2025
  • This epoch is so-called because we Earthlings have yet to sense anything from this time period, which started about 380,000 years after the big bang and lasted 200 million to 400 million years.
    — Harry Goldstein, IEEE Spectrum, 1 Feb. 2026
  • The 200-mile, so-called, Red Zone in southern California remains the cargo theft hotspot, but motivated by the possibility of lucrative payoffs, thieves are willing to go beyond the zone to make their scores.
    — Ed Garsten, Forbes.com, 8 Aug. 2025

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