How to Use sublimate in a Sentence

sublimate

verb
  • I sublimated my grief at the death of my mother by throwing myself into my work.
  • She sublimated her erotic feelings into a series of paintings.
  • To sublimate this film of words, the director put huge care in the images and music.
    — Trinidad Barleycorn, Variety, 28 Apr. 2023
  • Regions that start out dark get hot enough to sublimate ice and thus become darker and hotter.
    — Carolyn Porco, Scientific American, 1 Oct. 2017
  • On a dry, windy day, up to around two inches of snow can sublimate into the atmosphere.
    — Steven R. Fassnacht, The Conversation, 27 July 2021
  • These women sublimated their own needs for those of others, and always did it with a smile.
    — Maya Rupert, The Atlantic, 29 May 2017
  • Sports aren't sublimated war or life and death or anything more than entertainment for most of us.
    — Bill Livingston, cleveland.com, 6 Jan. 2018
  • So the idea was to have the three or four products that in a flash help sublimate a face with very simple and spontaneous gestures.
    — Sarah Spellings, The Cut, 14 June 2018
  • Over time, the ice sublimated (transitioned straight from a solid to a gas), and the patch faded.
    — The Washington Post, The Denver Post, 22 Mar. 2017
  • When spring arrives, the ice sublimates and summertime winds reawaken the movement of the sand.
    — Sharmila Kuthunur, Space.com, 28 Aug. 2025
  • In all that, there's some deeper metaphor, no doubt, about otherness, and all the ways that love and shame can sublimate even our core beliefs.
    — Leah Greenblatt, EW.com, 7 Sep. 2022
  • That is far beyond the distance where water ice can easily sublimate.
    — Chris Young, Interesting Engineering, 8 Oct. 2025
  • When the sun is shining, ices in the craters sublimate, or transition from a solid into a vapor.
    — Nathaniel Scharping, Discover Magazine, 9 Dec. 2015
  • The fire is causing the frozen mass of snow to sublimate straight into water vapor, not liquid water.
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 22 Feb. 2021
  • Since ice is a key component of a comet, when water starts to sublimate, the comet is also in danger of breaking apart.
    — Dan Falk, Smithsonian Magazine, 6 Dec. 2021
  • Higher winds can cause the snowpack to sublimate and redistribute the snowpack.
    — Trey Fulbright, CBS News, 4 Feb. 2026
  • When comets pass close to a star, the heat of the star causes their ice to sublimate, creating long, streaming tails that can stretch behind the comets.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 29 Apr. 2022
  • This causes the water molecules to sublimate, or change directly from a solid to a gas, and move out of the food.
    — James Lynch, Popular Mechanics, 7 Sep. 2019
  • The tiny blood siphons are attracted by the carbon dioxide that sublimates off the dry ice, like breath exhaled from a potential host.
    — Karla Moeller, Slate Magazine, 27 June 2017
  • Outer material could have either sublimated and then been lost to space.
    — Elizabeth Rayne, Ars Technica, 14 Oct. 2023
  • Each branch on the six arms looks almost like a feather because the flake has started to sublimate, or fade from a solid to gas, and has lost some hard angles.
    — Leslie Nemo, Scientific American, 11 Feb. 2021
  • The air has also been dry, allowing some of the snow to sublimate, meaning a solid undergoes a phase change to a vapor.
    — Trey Fulbright, CBS News, 4 Feb. 2026
  • Whose ability to focus on the emotional is all too often sublimated by the work of survival?
    — Maiysha Kai, The Root, 12 July 2017
  • Hartley is even willing to sublimate his ego, especially if Willis joins Kevin in an action movie.
    — Dan Snierson, EW.com, 29 June 2020
  • In those pictures, the pianist’s shoulders are contorted, hunched in effort, art sublimating pain.
    — Brendan Fitzgerald, Longreads, 10 Aug. 2020
  • As more carbon dioxide adds to the atmosphere, the atmosphere will trap more heat, which will sublimate more carbon dioxide, which will trap more heat, and so on.
    — Corey S. Powell, Discover Magazine, 13 Nov. 2018
  • During the rest of the year, water ice that forms quickly sublimates into the atmosphere, leaving no liquid behind.
    — Jennifer Leman, Popular Mechanics, 13 Feb. 2020
  • Water-ice is very difficult to boil or sublimate away, requiring temperatures at hundreds of kelvin.
    — Ethan Siegel, Big Think, 26 Aug. 2025
  • That a set has to be a giant machine that mulches dreams into labor rather than a nurturing environment that sublimates labor into dreams.
    — David Ehrlich, IndieWire, 1 Dec. 2025
  • Politics, once sublimated in her abstractions, bubbles up to the surface.
    — James Panero, WSJ, 1 Sep. 2018

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