How to Use suckle in a Sentence

suckle

verb
  • They're all nestled in a big bed and all pups are suckling fine.
    — Saryn Chorney, PEOPLE.com, 18 Oct. 2017
  • What's even stranger is that once the eggs hatched, the creatures suckled their young, like mammals.
    — Matthew Martinez, sacbee, 31 May 2018
  • Martins knew that the kittens would at four months not be suckling anymore.
    — Bill Lindelof, sacbee, 3 Aug. 2017
  • Cows munch lazily on hay; newborn piglets suckle their mothers’ teats.
    — Ken Budd, Washington Post, 6 Nov. 2019
  • Among the new offerings will be suckling pig and shareable paella.
    — Susan Selasky, Detroit Free Press, 19 June 2017
  • In some units, though not in Unit R, sperm whales even suckle one another’s young.
    — Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, 4 Sep. 2023
  • Renfield suckles from the same vein, but gets barely a drop of hilarity from it.
    — A.a. Dowd, Chron, 12 Apr. 2023
  • Hundreds of piglets — some even just a few hours after birth — are suckling, squealing and jumping around in their pens.
    — Casey Smith, Indianapolis Star, 10 June 2019
  • Pulling the joey from its mother, Midson then cut the mother's teat, on which the joey was still suckling.
    — National Geographic, 1 May 2017
  • The insects will have enough time to get used to their new home and then hopefully mate and burrow down to suckle at the roots of hazel trees.
    — Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY, 31 May 2024
  • At one point in the video, the calf tries to suckle on the tires of the blue car, which could indicate that the calf thought the car was its mother.
    — National Geographic, 6 July 2017
  • Those people under him are suckling on his piggly-wiggly titties.
    — David Rooney, HollywoodReporter, 10 Nov. 2025
  • If Greece was founded by a princess raped by a bull, Rome was founded by a baby suckled by a she-wolf.
    — Simon Jenkins, Harper's magazine, 10 Apr. 2019
  • Gillin said the method is used on suckling pigs and neonatal animals in the euthanasia guidelines.
    — oregonlive, 13 Nov. 2019
  • Some slaves, Jones-Rogers could say, were even known to serve as wet nurses, suckling the babes of their white counterparts.
    — Nathan Deuel, Los Angeles Times, 17 Apr. 2020
  • Surprising new research has revealed that the colorful great apes suckle for up to eight years, and in some cases longer.
    — National Geographic, 17 May 2017
  • The pups have the epicurean delight of suckling one of the highest fat-content milks in the animal kingdom.
    — John Metcalfe, Mercury News, 24 Nov. 2025
  • The high-ranking youngsters get to swim, play, and suckle from their moms in the pool, as the lower ranking monkeys look on dejectedly.
    — Eliza Strickland, Discover Magazine, 26 Mar. 2010
  • Like Romulus or Remus, I too was suckled by the Roman she-wolf.
    — Joshua Levine, Smithsonian, 24 May 2018
  • The time for burying our heads in the sand is long gone due to decades of inaction by legislators suckling at the trough of Big Oil.
    — Gillian Brassil, Sacramento Bee, 5 Feb. 2024
  • The find indicates that the ability to suckle and feed on milk evolved before the last common ancestor of today’s mammals.
    — Riley Black, Discover Magazine, 29 Sep. 2022
  • Xiang and his colleagues found that over the course of five birth seasons, more than 87 percent of infants suckled from females that were not their mothers.
    — National Geographic, 22 Feb. 2019
  • What kind of shameless black woman imagines a little white boy sucking on the tip of an African girl’s banana skirt as the girl also suckles herself?
    — Zadie Smith, The New York Review of Books, 11 Feb. 2020
  • But when a baby suckles a mom’s breasts, the mother’s brain’s posterior lobe secretes oxytocin, and some of that pain is relieved with the release of milk.
    — Julia Belluz, Vox, 15 June 2018
  • The last straw happened when Hera agreed to suckle the baby Heracles, a nice, forgiving gesture.
    — Brian T. Allen, National Review, 30 Oct. 2020
  • Dogs and cats often will suckle on a toy, or even another animal, as a way to re-create those memories of comfort from nursing their mothers.
    — Joan Morris, Mercury News, 8 Sep. 2025
  • Nipples provide no benefit to males, yet mammals have maintained them since the origin of suckling around 200 million years ago.
    — Richard Wrangham, WSJ, 10 Jan. 2019
  • After the birth, the infant was showing strong signs of suckling, and zoo staff thought that Kianga was providing excellent care, the release states.
    — Grant Lancaster, arkansasonline.com, 7 Sep. 2024
  • At the modern art museum, dozens of women first gathered on the grass outside with babies and toddlers suckling at their breasts, and then entered the building itself.
    — Washington Post, 24 Nov. 2019
  • The researchers said that the mongoose moms suckle all the pups in their underground dens for a month, without any discrimination, and pups feed from many different moms.
    — Katie Hunt, CNN, 23 June 2021

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