How to Use whalebone in a Sentence

whalebone

noun
  • That giant whalebone is the first major find this fall at a Bay Area beach.
    — Tom Stienstra, SFChronicle.com, 27 Oct. 2019
  • Eyelets show where the bodice was once laced, and there are imprints from whalebone stiffeners that were used for shaping.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 17 Feb. 2023
  • Designers and dressmakers used whalebone to provide the structure for corsets and skirts.
    — David Reamer | Alaska History, Anchorage Daily News, 6 Feb. 2023
  • Their ancestors had carved a civilization out of the ice with tools made from whalebone and meteorite fragments.
    — Ken Harbaugh, The Atlantic, 9 Feb. 2026
  • Moynihan said there are no other whalebone gates remaining in the region — and possibly, the country.
    — Laney Ruckstuhl, BostonGlobe.com, 18 Apr. 2018
  • Later iterations included girdles and corsets made of whalebone, iron and leather.
    — Abha Bhattarai, Washington Post, 8 May 2021
  • The corset of the 1880s was an armpit-to-hip garment stiffened with whalebone stays, which helped the hips support heavy skirts that hung from the waist.
    — Aaron Gilbreath, Longreads, 6 July 2018
  • Its Flintstones-like tumble of houses were made from wood and whalebone and had no running water or electricity.
    — Emma O'Kelly, Condé Nast Traveler, 21 Dec. 2017
  • That particular task was messy; the harvesting of whale parts — oil to light lamps and use in cosmetics, baleen for whalebone corsets, tongue for food — was hard labor.
    — New York Times, 13 Jan. 2021
  • Traditionally fashioned with metal or whalebone stays and laced up the back, the waist-cinching, bust-elevating garment has cycled in and out of style for centuries.
    — Katharine K. Zarrella, WSJ, 3 Apr. 2021
  • The city's notable Key Ranch bordered on our subdivision, complete with its old farmhouse and secret garden with its famed whalebone on display.
    — Benjamin Oreskes, latimes.com, 25 Apr. 2018
  • This style was hugely popular during the Belle Époque, when the pouf ballooned to huge proportions, sometimes supported with strips of whalebone.
    — Nancy Schoeffler, courant.com, 15 July 2019
  • The pictures represented all types of works including soapstone, alabaster, African wonderstone, wood, whalebone, ivory, grass.
    — Tamara Ikenberg, Alaska Dispatch News, 7 July 2017
  • Panniers, those underskirt structures that exaggerated hips, were a 16th-century version of shapewear; so were steel or whalebone and canvas corsets.
    — New York Times, 30 Mar. 2022
  • Under the leadership of the indomitable Cristabel, and with scenery devised by a louche Russian painter, the children put on theatrical productions staged in a whalebone structure.
    — Katherine A. Powers, Washington Post, 22 Nov. 2022
  • By 1974, though, many women had already discarded those notions as instruments of domination, psychic equivalents of the whalebone corset.
    — James Marcus, New Yorker, 3 Nov. 2025
  • Made using materials like whalebone and metal, corsets contained and constrained women’s bodies, keeping them in place (literally and figuratively).
    — Laird Borrelli-Persson, Vogue, 23 Nov. 2021
  • The town’s oldest buildings are clustered together near the Utqiaġvik Presbyterian Church, marked with a whalebone sign dated 1898.
    — Wyatt Williams, Harper's Magazine, 17 Aug. 2021
  • Later, visit the Itsanitaq Museum for a look at indigenous Arctic culture through the ages, marveling at hundreds of Inuit artifacts—from whalebone carvings and ancient harpoon heads to narwhal tusks.
    — National Geographic, 20 Sep. 2019

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