How to Use sunder in a Sentence

sunder

verb
  • About one-fifth of the core structural columns in each tower were sundered by the planes.
    — New York Times, 10 July 2018
  • Others, like me, wake up in the middle of the night, their sleep sundered into two chunks.
    — Rowan Jacobsen, Harpers Magazine, 24 Oct. 2025
  • Dissonant brass chords sundered the hall’s warm air like lightning.
    — Justin Davidson, Vulture, 18 Mar. 2024
  • As in all romances, what is sundered in the beginning must be joined together at the end; the world and all the people in it must be made whole.
    — Merve Emre, The New Yorker, 27 Feb. 2023
  • During that time friendships have been sundered, garments rended, pearls clutched and block buttons exhausted.
    — Eamon Lynch, Golfweek, 4 Feb. 2020
  • There’s no need to recount the specific policy disputes that sundered the caucus, because there were none.
    — David Harsanyi, National Review, 12 Oct. 2023
  • Once ties with Rome had been sundered, however, there was little to stop a more decisive break from tradition.
    — Jeff Cimmino, National Review, 28 July 2017
  • Any move to sunder diplomatic relations again would recreate a long-standing irritant for the region.
    — The Economist, 5 Oct. 2017
  • And not now, as Israeli airstrikes crashed around him for the third week, erasing more of his neighborhood and sundering hundreds of families and friendships.
    — TIME, 28 Oct. 2023
  • Is Theodor Kramer’s poem another means of exploring the way ordinary life can suddenly be sundered?
    — Cressida Leyshon, The New Yorker, 29 Sep. 2024
  • Political disputes have sundered families ‒ some siblings are no longer talking ‒ and heartless or thoughtless social media posts can bring people to tears.
    — Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY, 15 Sep. 2024
  • The unprotected noticed, and began to sunder their relationship with establishments and elites.
    — Peggy Noonan, WSJ, 14 Feb. 2019
  • Comcast and Versant won’t be completely sundered after the split, as the USGA deal demonstrates.
    — David Bloom, Forbes.com, 14 Aug. 2025
  • Hundreds of students languish at home, still out of school weeks after Hurricane Harvey made landfall in coastal Texas, sundering even sturdy school buildings.
    — Moriah Balingit, Washington Post, 18 Sep. 2017
  • Moore and Prater sundered their professional relationship in 1970.
    — Chris Morris, Variety, 11 Jan. 2025
  • When the French officer Alfred Dreyfus was accused of treason in 1894, public opinion was sundered in half.
    — Jeet Heer, The New Republic, 30 Apr. 2018
  • The company has already sundered its businesses internally into two divisions ahead of a formal separation.
    — Jill Goldsmith, Deadline, 6 Nov. 2025
  • Alanoud Aljalahma, a 22-year-old premedical student, recounts how the rift between the Gulf’s royal clans threatened to sunder her own family.
    — The Economist, 21 June 2018
  • Bob Corker and Lindsey Graham are working on an alternative that would send a message to the Saudis without sundering the relationship.
    — The Editorial Board, WSJ, 3 Dec. 2018
  • The minds of many viewers will immediately drift away from the fictional narrative and toward the actual events of recent weeks, along the same boundary, where children have been sundered from their immigrant parents and housed in detention centers.
    — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 9 July 2017
  • At the moment, a blockade on land crossings into Qatar mostly threatens food deliveries and sundered families, said the administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
    — Mark Landler and Gardiner Harris, New York Times, 9 June 2017
  • Whatever else, the ballot will bookend a long-running and visceral argument, confronting Britons with what many depict as an existential choice that has sown division beyond political factions to sunder friends and relatives.
    — Alan Cowell, New York Times, 28 Apr. 2016
  • And Melanie Field movingly reveals the conflict her character, Laura, experiences in falling in love with a man who is unbelievably great yet who can’t help sundering her from her gay significant other.
    — Charles McNulty, latimes.com, 13 Apr. 2018
  • But Wu worries that Beijing’s anger toward Pelosi’s visit may sunder the delicate connections between Taiwan’s business and political elite and mainland leaders.
    — Grady McGregor, Fortune, 2 Aug. 2022
  • It was booked to fly on a Soyuz in 2022, but Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February of that year sundered the international partnership that led to the deal, putting the satellite in mothballs for a spell.
    — Mike Wall, Space.com, 3 May 2026
  • But oddly, The New Yorker at 100 doesn’t explore the biggest challenge the magazine has faced in the last 15 years or so – responding to the digital age that sundered so many other once-influential magazines like Time, Newsweek, and Sports Illustrated (which technically still exist, but whatever).
    — Matthew Carey, Deadline, 1 Sep. 2025

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