How to Use subservience in a Sentence

subservience

noun
  • Kate’s final speech of seeming subservience feels so out of date.
    — San Diego Union-Tribune, 3 June 2022
  • His utter subservience to the party’s donor class breaks from the pattern.
    — Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, 31 Aug. 2017
  • There is no fog of subservience surrounding the concept.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 8 Aug. 2019
  • Ray is the leader of a biker gang and demands utter subservience.
    — Jason P. Frank, Vulture, 2 Oct. 2025
  • The faces of his figures refuse to behave or resolve into visual subservience.
    — Philip Kennicott, Washington Post, 21 Aug. 2019
  • Drollinger’s fondness for abject subservience even extends to climate change.
    — Nina Burleigh, Newsweek, 5 Oct. 2017
  • These young ladies are primed for a life of modesty and subservience to their husbands and the future fathers of their children.
    — Rosy Cordero, Deadline, 4 June 2026
  • Her subservience pays off , as she's allowed to reunite with Noah, who's crying upstairs.
    — Matt Cabral, EW.com, 26 Oct. 2022
  • The result is that women, in the context of the event, seem contained by it, a form of subservience framed as the agency of artistry.
    — Washington Post, 2 Aug. 2021
  • One way to break the pattern of subservience, Swift seems to be saying, is to become the monster itself.
    — Annabel Gutterman, Time, 21 Oct. 2022
  • His subservience to Putin and Erdogan has inflamed the growing proxy war.
    — Washington Post, 10 Jan. 2020
  • In the aftermath, Hoskins set aside his own grief in subservience to that of his younger sister, Meloria.
    — Dave Sheinin, chicagotribune.com, 30 Aug. 2017
  • This event was far more centered on celebrating those attending rather than showing any subservience to the king.
    — Alexander Smith, NBC News, 6 May 2023
  • But plots devised to teach these women subservience have been rendered obsolete by a late-evolving common sense.
    — Charles McNulty, latimes.com, 2 Apr. 2018
  • Luther demanded absolute subservience to the German prince by his flock, no matter how bad the prince might be.
    — Win McCormack, The New Republic, 30 Dec. 2020
  • How does party capture — the subservience of entire systems — factor into this?
    — Nikki McCann Ramirez, Rolling Stone, 22 Sep. 2025
  • But their rule before she was born has become its own history lessons, now amplified as her classmates dread a return to subservience.
    — Author: Alex Horton, Ezzatullah Mehrdad, Anchorage Daily News, 11 Aug. 2021
  • His craven subservience to Putin also has been a central pillar of his administration.
    — Steve Chapman, chicagotribune.com, 4 Dec. 2019
  • The modesty costumes were meant to indicate subservience, but they have been redeployed by activists to mean the opposite.
    — Annie Sutherland, Quartzy, 13 June 2019
  • His is the first whose subservience to the prevailing darkness feels like a depressing surrender of identity.
    — Wesley Morris, New York Times, 25 Dec. 2024
  • The Tigers also boasted the world’s fiercest army of women, even as Tamil society imposed a culture of subservience.
    — Longreads, 22 May 2018
  • In the long run, the work of the Society is ultimately not subservience to Whites, but the saving of Black lives.
    — Michael O'Sullivan, Washington Post, 15 Mar. 2024
  • The price of borrowing from China is tough terms of repayment and political subservience.
    — Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 25 Mar. 2021
  • Their stories are buried within sources intended to promote white supremacy and black subservience, not to celebrate or credit black knowledge.
    — NBC News, 6 Sep. 2019
  • Usually, however, a male will yield to the stronger challenger, often showing subservience by grooming or making a coughing sound.
    — National Geographic, 5 Dec. 2016
  • Exchanging glimpses of flesh for beads, on the other hand, replaced symbolic subservience with a free-market mentality.
    — Doug MacCash | Staff Writer, NOLA.com, 9 Dec. 2020
  • But standing is a sign of respect, and Miss Manners finds no subservience in showing it for old age, high position or your favorite performer.
    — Judith Martin, oregonlive, 18 Apr. 2023
  • Its originators wanted to escape their subservience to real-world referents and let shape and color act as a language all their own, like musical notes.
    — Sebastian Smee, Washington Post, 5 May 2023
  • The event would be retold over the years as an archetypal narrative of male supremacy and barbarity and abject female subservience.
    — Rebecca Giggs, The Atlantic, 6 May 2022
  • The word captured the growing frustration with internet subservience and AI overlords.
    — Literary Hub, 13 Nov. 2025

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