How to Use totem in a Sentence

totem

noun
  • Private jets are a totem of success among extremely wealthy people.
  • The dolls loomed large as objects of beauty and as totems of the past.
    — Meryl Gordon, Town & Country, 21 May 2014
  • Along the shoulder, ashen wisps of tree trunks stand sentinel like totem poles.
    — Lauren Frayer, latimes.com, 20 June 2017
  • These guys ain't played a game, always hurt, and at the bottom of the totem pole.
    — Andrew Joseph, USA TODAY, 5 July 2017
  • Ketchikan adds totem heritage, creek-side boardwalks and salmon runs right through town.
    — Jill Schildhouse, Forbes.com, 14 Aug. 2025
  • The totem acted as a reminder that my daughter had been through so much more.
    — Lindzi Scharf, Peoplemag, 18 July 2024
  • Liz leaps down from the risers and runs out to drag the giant totem and move the tables.
    — David Gordon, Harper's magazine, 6 Jan. 2020
  • The world was enchanted, alive with gods, totems, and unseen forces.
    — Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Forbes.com, 29 May 2025
  • These guys ain’t played a game, [are] always hurt, and [are] at the bottom of the totem pole.
    — Jonathan Tannenwald, Philly.com, 29 June 2017
  • The Corvette is seen too often as an anachronism or a sad totem of mid-life crises.
    — Dan Carney, Popular Science, 2 Jan. 2020
  • In any case, the group did take from the site 10 totem and house poles as well as smaller items.
    — Nancy Lord, Anchorage Daily News, 3 Oct. 2021
  • Your movie was held up as this totem of boomer nostalgia and the other movie was the fresh new thing.
    — David Marchese, New York Times, 10 June 2022
  • The camera is Bing’s totem of power, her passport to the world.
    — Steven Litt, cleveland, 12 July 2020
  • Even the youthful players in this big field look to its totems who existed on the fringes.
    — Andrew Dansby, Houston Chronicle, 25 Oct. 2017
  • The whale tooth was treated as a totem or sacred object, researchers said.
    — Lauren Liebhaber, Miami Herald, 19 May 2025
  • We’re seated in his office, which is dark and cool and full of totems from his wide-ranging career.
    — Mickey Rapkin, Town & Country, 17 Oct. 2018
  • Haring’s totems clearly express this idea.
    — Glenn Adamson, Artforum, 2 May 2026
  • And so the totems were born of the group’s desire to step away from the paper-swatch paint store paradigm.
    — Asad Syrkett, Curbed, 30 Nov. 2018
  • The brand made use of gold ring-style anatomical totem heels and sculptural heels inspired by bird claws as well.
    — Jaden Thompson, Footwear News, 3 Sep. 2019
  • This earth, scooped from the hometown of Toni Morrison is my totem.
    — Time, 7 Aug. 2019
  • And so the book turned into a totem for Western progressives.
    — Tunku Varadarajan, WSJ, 8 Apr. 2022
  • In that sense, the parks serve as a reminder of personal joy, a physical totem of their bliss.
    — Shirley Li, The Atlantic, 3 Aug. 2020
  • But for a city break with all the totems of winter, Boston more than delivers.
    — Mark Ellwood, AFAR Media, 7 Nov. 2025
  • In one, Dopey becomes a mutant totem pole, each of his faces bigger than the one below it.
    — David Pagel, latimes.com, 14 Aug. 2017
  • JonOne's custom design is a totem that blends urban art with the distiller's craft.
    — Jason Tesauro, Esquire, 12 June 2017
  • In totem, Christiansen, wrote about the arts in Chicago for even longer than Weiss.
    — Chris Jones, chicagotribune.com, 8 Feb. 2018
  • The show is greater proof that, at 35 years old, Butler has become a totem of success.
    — Nick Mafi, Architectural Digest, 3 Oct. 2024
  • Indians are Asians who are white-adjacent so at the bottom of the totem poll.
    — Nicholas Confessore, New York Times, 20 Jan. 2024
  • All the other pieces are wood — chunky disks for the rocks, thin disks for the totems, and rectangles (long and short) for the hammers.
    — Jonathan H. Liu, WIRED, 29 Feb. 2012
  • The Man in Black kept the scalp with him as a totem, but how the symbol got there was never explained.
    — Bryan Bishop, The Verge, 11 June 2018

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