How to Use intellectual in a Sentence

intellectual

1 of 2 adjective
Definition of intellectualnext
Synonyms for intellectualnext
  • These thoughts had the effect of a bomb in African intellectual life.
    — Adam Nossiter, New York Times, 19 Mar. 2024
  • Keplinger didn't have the common touch and might be seen as rather intellectual and privileged and aloof and out of touch.
    — Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 24 Mar. 2024
  • An intellectual battle rages: Is the U.S. in a proxy war with Russia?
    — Sammy Westfall, Washington Post, 20 Apr. 2023
  • Take an intellectual approach to change instead of letting brute force lead the way.
    — Eugenia Last, The Mercury News, 23 Jan. 2024
  • That the characters also live in a world of ideas gives the play its intellectual heft and complex texture, both light and profound.
    — Jesse Green, New York Times, 13 Sep. 2023
  • Writing has often been viewed as one of the three legs of an intellectual stool—the other two being reading and thinking.
    — Paige Hagy, Fortune, 17 Aug. 2023
  • Daniel, intellectual and rigid, ran the business, while Sylvia, who was light and cheerful, played the nurturer in the family.
    — Rachel Corbett, New York Times, 23 Aug. 2023
  • But this kind of crutch isn’t available for most of the intellectual problems humanity would like to solve.
    — Timothy B. Lee, Ars Technica, 18 Jan. 2024
  • My mother had first started playing poker for the fun and for the intellectual challenge.
    — Krista Stevens, Longreads, 12 May 2023
  • So, yes, what Smith has composed is a brilliant document, and like him, it's got intellectual heft.
    — Mike Freeman, USA TODAY, 9 July 2023
  • The point of learning to write is not simply intellectual self-discovery.
    — Asim Ali, The Conversation, 4 Sep. 2023
  • And dating app DMs aren’t the place for intellectual grandstanding.
    — Tatum Hunter, Washington Post, 27 Nov. 2023
  • In an intellectual discussion, the use of hyperbole should trigger suspicion in the mind of the reader.
    — Letters To The Editor, The Mercury News, 31 Jan. 2024
  • In early moments, Dalton takes on the low-level threats, and the focus is on a kind of intellectual combat that flaunts his precision and agility.
    — Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter, 8 Mar. 2024
  • Such is the deeply disturbed state of the left: part Alice-in-Wonderland on steroids, part mind-bending intellectual dishonesty.
    — Jeff Robbins, Orange County Register, 14 Mar. 2024
  • The ideas of the intellectual framework have existed since the 1960s and were never officially taught at public schools.
    — Philip Jankowski, Dallas News, 13 Apr. 2023
  • The city looms large in the Black intellectual history of the 20th century, and for many on this side of Y2K, the prospect of finding freedom overseas remains as alluring as ever.
    — Hannah Giorgis, The Atlantic, 26 June 2023
  • King provides a portrait of Florence’s intellectual circles, and a sense of their importance to the city’s artistic culture.
    — Claudia Roth Pierpont, The New Yorker, 19 Feb. 2024
  • The victims' ages ranged from 33 to 69, and all of them had intellectual or physical disabilities.
    — Landon Mion, Fox News, 19 Feb. 2024
  • The idea that Jews would work the land was central to a new Jewish identity different from the intellectual or businessman of the diaspora.
    — Emily Bazelon, New York Times, 1 Feb. 2024
  • But this Oscar belongs to Stone for charting the arc of Bella’s physical, intellectual and moral growth with the precision of an astronomer.
    — Amy Nicholson, Los Angeles Times, 7 Mar. 2024
  • In person, Pierce is gently disarming, with none of the intellectual pretension of Niles Crane.
    — Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times, 11 Dec. 2023
  • As this happens, the cannabis consumer is becoming more and more attracted to intellectual use.
    — Philip Wolf, Rolling Stone, 26 Oct. 2023
  • For them, the theater was a form that united intellectual rigor with expressive potential but also offered a path into the mainstream, or at least a louche branch of it.
    — Jesse Green, New York Times, 28 Nov. 2023
  • In the historic city center, the heart of Ukraine's intellectual community, the windows of its modernist buildings are boarded up, though that doesn't mean the businesses inside are closed.
    — Claire Harbage, NPR, 24 Feb. 2024
  • This is the next iteration of the intellectual condescension that has been a major contributor to the rise of populism.
    — David Meadvin, Fortune, 16 Feb. 2024
  • Researchers like Loeb explore ideas and spin out explanations as a way to help push forward the intellectual rigor in their fields, even if, like Loeb, some researchers are considered more fringe.
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 16 Aug. 2023
  • Its high-production, intellectual content has garnered a loyal fanbase but, aside from its flagship show, is maybe more niche than what the market allows for right now.
    — Ariel Shapiro, The Verge, 3 Oct. 2023
  • Here's how celebrity astrologer Kyle Thomas predicts the love lives, careers and intellectual pursuits for Cancer will be impacted in 2024.
    — Skyler Caruso, Peoplemag, 27 Jan. 2024
  • Passing laws to ban certain kinds of speech or ideas from college campuses is no way to promote true free speech and intellectual diversity.
    — Bradford Vivian, The Conversation, 5 June 2023
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intellectual

2 of 2 noun
  • He thinks that he's an intellectual, but he doesn't know what he's talking about.
  • She's a hard worker but she's no great intellectual.
  • This was true not only of run-of-the-mill Jews but of intellectuals and writers as well.
    — Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker, 15 Feb. 2024
  • The ideas marketplace, Drezner explained, arose in the 1990s with the decline of the public intellectual and the rise of the thought leader.
    — Timothy Noah, The New Republic, 28 Oct. 2021
  • John Edgar Wideman is that splendid thing, a black intellectual—full of grandeur and agony, rage and poise.
    — Tobi Haslett, The New York Review of Books, 1 Dec. 2022
  • In the face of all this disapproval, a few intellectuals have decided to claim the term for themselves.
    — Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker, 27 Mar. 2023
  • One of the rarest things in movies is the credible portrayal of an intellectual.
    — New York Times, 7 Dec. 2021
  • The book gives astonishing insights into the lives and minds of intellectuals at the camp.
    — Douglas Starr, Smithsonian Magazine, 29 Aug. 2023
  • My dad was a deep thinker, an intellectual, a man with a vocabulary as big as his heart.
    — Annie Lane, oregonlive, 18 June 2023
  • Justin [Trosper] is a true intellectual, and the contrast of him and Vern was savage.
    — Nina Corcoran, Pitchfork, 2 Oct. 2023
  • That was the beginning of Weiss’s new role as a public intellectual.
    — Ian Johnson, The New Yorker, 13 Dec. 2022
  • Michael: Tell us who the four or five biggest names in this crowd are. Julie: So many of the post-liberal are kind of this emerging field of mostly Catholic intellectuals.
    — How To Save A Country, The New Republic, 27 Apr. 2023
  • Mod, in the harder of the two roles, plays Emma as an intellectual who’s neither nerdy nor prissy, and capable of having fun.
    — TIME, 6 Feb. 2024
  • The story of a young intellectual whose life is ruined by the regime for writing a flippant postcard proved too much for the post-Dubcek authorities.
    — Will Tizard, Variety, 2 July 2022
  • Feldman, a polymath and public intellectual at Harvard Law School, picks up more or less where Magid leaves off.
    — Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker, 15 Feb. 2024
  • The enormously influential intellectual, who died over the weekend at 79, kept up the fight until the very end.
    — Jeffrey C. Isaac, The New Republic, 7 Feb. 2022
  • An intellectual of his stature writing about the Warriors is like if Mark Twain worked a side gig as a Fangraphs contributor.
    — Danny Emerman, The Mercury News, 3 Feb. 2024
  • The Black intellectual’s case to leave is rooted in the need to protect our existence, to find peace and true freedom, to preserve ourselves, our sanity and our lives.
    — Deneen L. Brown, Washington Post, 26 Sep. 2022
  • The most demanding part of Mann’s Princeton life, however, and that which forms the bulk of Corngold’s book, must have been his activism as a public intellectual.
    — Washington Post, 18 Feb. 2022
  • The scenes of intellectuals trying to live up to lofty ideals in these circumstances made for incidents ripe with poignant comedy.
    — Joseph Berger, New York Times, 13 Apr. 2023
  • Zemmour plays the role of a French intellectual, a social type that carries similar prestige in France.
    — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 3 Dec. 2021
  • Still, as the longest-serving heir apparent, Charles was familiar to Britons, many of whom regard him as a fussy intellectual — more head than heart.
    — Richard Jerome, Peoplemag, 9 Sep. 2022
  • Tate Britain, a bad sandwich, a ferry ride and a play, but her thoughts spiral through the history of her mother, a strong intellectual with a magnetic sense of joy and wonder.
    — Allison Larkin, Washington Post, 11 Oct. 2022
  • To these intellectuals, dreams—including daydreams, dreams born in sleep, and nightmares—showed us our hidden desires and demons.
    — Hazlitt, 28 June 2022
  • The rest of the country—the right-leaning suburbs, the rural places, the Archie Bunkers—were constantly prone, in the minds of America’s intellectuals and enlightened academics, to indulge in racial grievances.
    — Barton Swaim, WSJ, 29 Dec. 2023
  • There have been a handful of intellectuals and experts who have risen to some prominence on the right and were later outed for their previous extremist rhetoric.
    — Brandy Zadrozny, NBC News, 6 Oct. 2023
  • People often assume that someone who is a style icon can’t be an intellectual.
    — Andrew Solomon, Town & Country, 1 Nov. 2022
  • Like bacon in the knuckles of a dog handler, power reliably brings intellectuals to heel.
    — Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review, 18 Oct. 2023
  • In short, McLuhan was everywhere someone could be and far more places than anyone expected an intellectual might be.
    — Nick Ripatrazone, The Week, 14 Mar. 2022
  • Stockman, who is having a solo show in June at Almine Rech in London, is the house intellectual, bringing books and articles to the others’ attention.
    — Dodie Kazanjian, Vogue, 12 Mar. 2022

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