How to Use tentacular in a Sentence

tentacular

adjective
  • Yet no firm can match these tech titans’ tentacular reach into the everyday lives of Chinese consumers.
    — The Economist, 5 Apr. 2018
  • Also in residence is a thing—a tentacular beast, which at first is dimly discernible, wine-red, glistening in a dark corner.
    — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 1 Oct. 2021
  • My film isn’t about the attacks but rather about the tentacular investigation that was carried on by this special brigade to track down the two masterminds behind the attacks for five days.
    — Elsa Keslassy, Variety, 27 May 2022
  • The series also chronicles the tentacular investigation launched in the aftermath of the tragedy.
    — Elsa Keslassy, Variety, 22 July 2022
  • Yi’s floating forms respond to the air in Turbine Hall in unpredictable ways, with each of the tentacular, bulbous creatures programmed to display its own set of behaviors.
    — New York Times, 11 Oct. 2021
  • The Chinese state relies upon private enterprise to implement social credit and extend its tentacular reach.
    — Adam Greenfield, The Atlantic, 14 Feb. 2018
  • The premise of Wickworld is cleverly paranoiac, built around the tentacular connections between the crude underworld of contract killers and the shadowy overlords who keep them in action.
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 21 Mar. 2023
  • Financial entanglement was only one aspect of slavery’s tentacular reach.
    — Andrew Delbanco, The New York Review of Books, 8 June 2022
  • For starters, the dreadful contemplation of showers of metallic-bead goo spewing from a hole on the surface of the moon and forming tentacular monsters of deadly dexterity is both ludicrous and eerie—what is in there?
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 4 Feb. 2022
  • The town is dominated by a tentacular organization, ominously called only the Company, that wants to take over Reza’s land.
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 14 June 2022
  • The most striking aspect of Ta Prohm, however, is the enormous, sinuous trees that seem to snake upward from its rooftops, their long tentacular roots spilling from the structure’s windows and doors like water.
    — Hanya Yanagihara, Condé Nast Traveler, 10 Jan. 2022
  • Carillion has had a tentacular reach in Britain, not just in the running of schools and prisons, but in building hospitals, railways and thousands of homes for the Ministry of Defense.
    — Kimiko De Freytas-Tamura, New York Times, 15 Jan. 2018
  • The White Spikes are genuinely terrifying beasts — ghostly, tentacular, giant insectoids with beak-like mouths filled with fangs, who swarm like supersonic zombie flies.
    — Bilge Ebiri, Vulture, 2 July 2021
  • As Baby Groot’s companions battle the tentacular horror in the background, we’re treated to the delightful spectacle of the mini-veggie juking his way through the opening credits.
    — Christopher Orr, The Atlantic, 5 May 2017
  • But this may be one of the first for the Gen Z and younger generations that nails just how tentacular the psychology of such conditions can be, entwined with family dysfunction, social media influence and the run-of-the-mill patriarchy.
    — Leslie Felperin, The Hollywood Reporter, 20 Mar. 2023
  • His vision of the power of statecraft, from its tentacular surveillance to its carceral system, is a dreadful, fatalistic realism that shadows the romance of individualistic outlaws with the bureaucratic grid above the grid.
    — Richard Brod, The New Yorker, 25 June 2021
  • In the two movies Ethan made with Cooke and without his brother, Joel, criminal schemes with a tentacular grip on institutions and officials emerge as the perpetual and immutable way of the world, as decipherably practical versions of the cosmic joke.
    — Richard Brody, New Yorker, 21 Aug. 2025

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