How to Use synecdoche in a Sentence

synecdoche

noun
  • And Gawker is a synecdoche for that whole scene.
    — Ben Smith, semafor.com, 16 Jan. 2026
  • Both artists show systems through synecdoche, with parts standing in for wholes.
    — Emily Watlington, ARTnews.com, 24 May 2026
  • The synecdoche soon wore down, however, and other words came into view.
    — Ishion Hutchinson, The New York Review of Books, 19 Nov. 2020
  • First, there are several instances of synecdoche and merismus.
    — Sam Bray, Washington Post, 23 July 2017
  • The process of figuring out how to do that — what to put in the model and what to leave out — serves as a synecdoche for science as a whole.
    — Quanta Magazine, 17 Dec. 2025
  • And similarly, the synecdoche is just a larger focus of a much bigger and more global issue.
    — Hazlitt, 25 May 2023
  • The right sequence has been used as a synecdoche, indicating the presence of a particular species in a sample.
    — Diana Gitig, Ars Technica, 3 Nov. 2017
  • What film choruses offer us is a perfect synecdoche for the collective, frenzied, and deeply mercenary magic that creates movies in the first place.
    — Adrian Daub, Longreads, 3 Sep. 2021
  • Even if the flavors and textures of khoresht-e hulu are not all there is to Persian heritage, a traditional dish is a synecdoche for the culture.
    — Jonathon Keats, Forbes, 27 June 2022
  • In the nineteen-eighties, Pepper developed Alzheimer’s disease, the synecdoche in those days for all forms of dementia.
    — John McPhee, New Yorker, 20 Apr. 2026
  • King’s shudders and vibratos, half-shouts and glottal stops have become a synecdoche for the ongoing struggle for American freedom.
    — Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker, 15 May 2017
  • Season one started out aesthetically telling a story about one woman’s suffering that was meant as a kind of synecdoche of all women’s suffering.
    — Caroline Framke, Vox, 9 May 2018
  • Brokaw becomes, in his defense, a synecdoche for the proper success story, the ideal American man, the country itself and what is most precious in it.
    — Eve Fairbanks, The New Republic, 3 May 2018
  • But rather than presenting their fate as an ending, Simpson goes beyond rhetorical strategies of synecdoche and metonymy to represent the whole encased in ice.
    — Star Tribune, 12 Feb. 2021
  • As a synecdoche for the tragedy of our historical moment, consider a news item about the murder of nineteen schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas.
    — Michael Robbins, Harper’s Magazine , 9 Nov. 2022
  • How four generations of one American family are a synecdoche of the decline of the conservative movement.
    — Timothy Noah, The New Republic, 19 Feb. 2021
  • Ever since, the political right has turned the phrase into a notorious synecdoche for the Obama presidency.
    — Jonathan Chait, The Atlantic, 1 May 2026
  • On the album, Beyoncé wants to make Beyoncé the synecdoche for an American.
    — Doreen St. Félix, The New Yorker, 1 Apr. 2024
  • What some might call clear price-gouging tactics by such entities make for a convenient, and politically bipartisan, punching bag as a sort-of synecdoche of the sector's moral failings.
    — Sy Mukherjee, Fortune, 20 May 2021
  • Once these drugs became a synecdoche for the hippie counterculture, and some researchers (including ones at the CIA) did less-than-ethical work, the stigma stuck.
    — Sarah Scoles, Popular Science, 9 Nov. 2020
  • But that person was, without exception, typified as a white working man of rural origins, which became the synecdoche for Americanness itself, a reductive oxymoron of universality.
    — Sarah Churchwell, The New York Review of Books, 7 Feb. 2019
  • The figure of Cormery’s domineering grandmother, taking a rawhide switch to the troublemaking boy or up to her elbow in a toilet recovering a two-franc piece, is a synecdoche for the country’s intransigence and desperation.
    — Sam Sacks, WSJ, 16 Nov. 2018

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