How to Use tumbledown in a Sentence

tumbledown

adjective
  • Low walls of tumbledown stone, kept in place as a monument, mark the outlines of the cottages that once stood here.
    — Cathleen O'Grady, The Atlantic, 20 May 2022
  • The piles of tumbledown bricks on Long Beach streets took laborious weeks to clear away.
    — Patt Morrisoncolumnist, Los Angeles Times, 7 Mar. 2023
  • The bay itself divides the country in two; there are small islands and small coves, a yacht club on the west shore and a tumbledown shipyard on the east.
    — Carl Nolte, San Francisco Chronicle, 4 Sep. 2021
  • The drive follows several miles of twisting pavement past tumbledown barns and front lawns doubling as auto graveyards.
    — Popular Mechanics, 14 Apr. 2023
  • With no ties to bind him, Cal has acted on his dream and bought a tumbledown Irish cottage advertised on the Internet.
    — Washington Post, 5 Oct. 2020
  • Allen Moyer’s set consists of a rotating box that morphs from a tumbledown shack into a graceful farmhouse, a roadside bar, and a college dorm.
    — Justin Davidson, Vulture, 28 Sep. 2021
  • But the halo of wealth of the Bay Area has never reached the tumbledown homes, trailer park and ranches of Round Valley.
    — New York Times, 27 Oct. 2021
  • The cramped establishment, called Pizza House, hunkers in an alley within the tumbledown bazaar.
    — Paul Salopek, National Geographic, 21 Aug. 2019
  • Today, Santa Claus is a ghost town, inhabited by tumbledown buildings and families of rattlesnakes.
    — Ashlea Halpern, Condé Nast Traveler, 19 July 2018
  • Above them all is grandmother Muriel (Ann Reid), who lives in a large tumbledown manse where the family will gather intermittently.
    — Los Angeles Times, 23 Mar. 2022
  • Above them all is grandmother Muriel (Ann Reid), who lives in a large tumbledown manse where the family will gather intermittently across the years.
    — Robert Lloyd, chicagotribune.com, 26 June 2019
  • Other more conventional — if risky — ideas involve providing no-interest financing to fix up tumbledown properties.
    — Matthew Goldstein, New York Times, 4 Nov. 2017
  • The slip where the ship is now located is flanked on one side by cement stacks belching white smog; on the other is the tumbledown sanctuary where the ancient Athenians once celebrated their religious mystery rites.
    — Alexander Clapp, The New Republic, 28 Sep. 2020
  • Soon the sturdy adobes and ranch houses of Joshua Tree and Twentynine Palms gave way to makeshift homes cobbled together from tumbledown cabins, shipping containers and trailers.
    — New York Times, 19 Dec. 2017
  • Once a stronghold of canneries and lumber mills, the town has numerous tumbledown Victorians that have long been havens for artists, brewers, and various eccentrics—along with fans of The Goonies, who make pilgrimages to see where the seminal movie was shot.
    — David Amsden, Travel + Leisure, 10 June 2026
  • After reluctantly moving into a tumbledown 17th-century English cottage, Milli Proust has created a gorgeously unruly and varied source for her craft.
    — Carolyn Asome David Fernández, New York Times, 11 Oct. 2022
  • Then there is the matter of Bernadette herself, who spends her days randomly fixing up and tweaking elements of her tumbledown house and dictating memos to her virtual assistant, apparently named Manjula and located in India.
    — Alissa Wilkinson, Vox, 16 Aug. 2019
  • By 2008, the plan called for razing four tumbledown apartment complexes in the city and building bigger, modern developments in line with the New Urbanism concept, featuring open, walkable green spaces and an array of amenities.
    — Paul Duggan, Washington Post, 8 July 2017

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