How to Use tabula rasa in a Sentence

tabula rasa

noun
  • Keeping the tabula rasa in mind for the reader’s progress through the book.
    — Ryan Chapman, Longreads, 28 Aug. 2019
  • There’s no tabula rasa, no matter what John Locke may tell you.
    — Dominic Pino, National Review, 3 July 2021
  • Most of the surface of the stone is devoted to an empty scroll—a tabula rasa.
    — Mary Norris, New Yorker, 26 Feb. 2026
  • Call it a digital tabula rasa where the vibes are happy and hopeful.
    — Liana Satenstein, Vogue, 5 Jan. 2019
  • Clothing itself was a tabula rasa for adornment.
    — Minty Mellon, Vogue, 2 Oct. 2025
  • In many ways the fossils served as tabula rasa upon which artists project many other narratives.
    — Simon Worrall, National Geographic, 2 Sep. 2017
  • Each season is a tabula rasa in which the accomplishments of the past have been totally erased.
    — Larry Stone, The Seattle Times, 30 Aug. 2017
  • Anyone who can’t envision a transformation of that tabula rasa isn’t trying very hard.
    — Ann Killion, San Francisco Chronicle, 29 May 2021
  • The pandemic eliminated many commutes, took cars off the roads, and felt, at times, like a transportation tabula rasa.
    — Aarian Marshall, Wired, 11 Mar. 2021
  • The young men and women demonstrators, when speaking to both local and foreign journalists, sometimes speak of their desire for a tabula rasa.
    — Edwidge Danticat, The New Yorker, 10 Oct. 2019
  • Ever since the time of Aristotle, thinkers have assumed that the soul or the mind is initially a blank slate, a tabula rasa on which experiences are painted.
    — György Buzsáki, Scientific American, 14 May 2022
  • And yet, despite these decidedly unglamorous associations, the messenger bag feels like a tabula rasa for the return to the office.
    — Liana Satenstein, Vogue, 9 Aug. 2021
  • For many Americans, New Year’s Day means a new set of resolutions, a slight headache, and a refreshing tabula rasa.
    — Aarian Marshall, Wired, 18 Dec. 2019
  • Neuroscience inherited the blank slate framework millennia after early thinkers gave names like tabula rasa to mental operations.
    — György Buzsáki, Scientific American, 14 May 2022
  • While Kardashian has had bombastic and excessive fashion moments, her Balenciaga era is a clean slate, a tabula rasa setting the stage for what’s to come.
    — Liana Satenstein, Vogue, 9 Dec. 2021
  • Progressives take a tabula rasa view of the human condition, the human animal, the human experience, and human society.
    — Kevin D. Williamson, National Review, 8 Oct. 2017
  • For many in policymaking circles, the pandemic is a tabula rasa, a moment to rethink the status quo of transportation and development dominated by the car.
    — Aarian Marshall, Wired, 19 May 2020
  • By invoking the tabula rasa as an integral feature of human nature in which individuals can advance from inferior to superior upwards along the chain of life.
    — Guest Blogger, Discover Magazine, 5 Oct. 2012
  • Voluminous white shirt-dresses served as a tabula rasa, a blank canvas, which Piccioli then adorned with delicate gold jewelry, such as a round necklace with a figurative bird pendant.
    — San Diego Union-Tribune, 29 Sep. 2019
  • Thackray is not asking anyone to trade in their Strad for a slim-olin—one, after all, is not like the other—but, rather, to posit that the violin can be a tabula rasa for gleeful, impractical experimentation.
    — Jennifer Gerste, The New Yorker, 2 July 2021
  • Her underlying aim was to explore the idea—derived from John Locke—of the newborn as a tabula rasa, whose character is determined by experience rather than innate qualities.
    — The Economist, 17 Feb. 2018
  • With uproarious derisiveness yet also empathetic warmth, Jarmusch borrows a small but solid batch of horror-movie tropes to evoke an existential tabula rasa with (almost) no way out.
    — Paige Williams, The New Yorker, 14 June 2019
  • Caril Ann Fugate, at only 14, became a tabula rasa onto which civilians could project almost exclusively negative and damning thoughts.
    — Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter, 16 Feb. 2023
  • In the 17th century John Locke rejected this idea, insisting that the human mind begins as a tabula rasa, or blank slate, with almost all knowledge acquired through experience.
    — Jacob Beck, Scientific American, 14 Feb. 2023
  • Building off of this, advocates of state communism, such as Vladimir Lenin or Josef Stalin, believed that each of us was born tabula rasa, with a blank slate, and that human nature could be molded in the interests of those in power.
    — Guest Blogger, Discover Magazine, 5 Oct. 2012

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