How to Use bestial in a Sentence

bestial

adjective
  • Late cast bronze sculptures look both botanical and bestial.
    Julianne McShane, New York Times, 29 Aug. 2019
  • Last week, two beautiful young lives were destroyed in a moment of bestial violence.
    Christine M. Flowers, Philly.com, 10 May 2018
  • Such epiphanies, though bookended in Wright's novel between the bestial horrors of its first section and the abject bleakness of its third, are what give the novel its lasting glow.
    Gene Seymour, CNN, 26 May 2021
  • Some distance between the source and the story would have benefited the themes at play, which end up buried beneath punches, slurs and bestial masculinity.
    Carlos Aguilar, Los Angeles Times, 23 Oct. 2019
  • All of them, no matter how bestial, or politically taboo.
    Redbook, 22 Jan. 2018
  • Frank himself could easily be a habitué of an old Max Fleischer cartoon—a cousin to Bimbo the Dog, perhaps—with his rubbery black limbs, white gloves and shoes, and cute, bestial, species-nonspecific features.
    Sam Thielman, The New Yorker, 9 Aug. 2022
  • The streaks provide proof of our mundane bestial reality—our hormones, our lunch, our particular whorls and spirals.
    Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker, 1 Sep. 2021
  • Some singers get up in front of audiences and attack sets with bestial ferocity before partying all night long, but that approach has an expiration date.
    Nathan Grayson, Washington Post, 9 Aug. 2022
  • Humanity consists of deformed half-wits with bestial appetites.
    Stephen Holden, New York Times, 28 Feb. 2017
  • Bodily fluids — bestial and human — stain the screen, punctuating a story that’s as much about rediscovering place as finding love.
    Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times, 24 Oct. 2017
  • Without relying on makeup or costuming, DeCaro’s extended transformation is a comedic tour de force as Gene becomes more and more bestial.
    Sam Hurwitt, The Mercury News, 6 June 2019
  • Animal Poison Control is this awesome 24-hour hotline manned by health experts who specialize in bestial ingestion of unusual items.
    Lisa Katayama, WIRED, 23 Feb. 2007
  • Abolitionists claimed that the eloquence of slaves and Africans proved their equal humanity, but most Europeans had long taken for granted that black utterances were inherently inferior, even bestial.
    Fara Dabhoiwala, The New York Review of Books, 3 Aug. 2020
  • The sparseness of the fossil record has confounded attempts to understand the ways that prehistoric mammals gave birth and brought up their babies, leaving significant gaps in our understanding of our broader bestial family’s history.
    Riley Black, Smithsonian Magazine, 26 Oct. 2022
  • Our reduced olfactory apparatus was the detritus of a bestial and benighted past, and an allegory of our enlightenment.
    Scott Sayare, Harper's Magazine, 23 Nov. 2021
  • Vaccination was also bestial, because humans were being poisoned with disgusting stuff from an animal.
    The Economist, 30 Aug. 2019
  • Lincoln’s opponents tarred him with racist and bestial characterizations.
    Calvin Schermerhorn, The Conversation, 6 Aug. 2020
  • Preachers began to tell anecdotes about deceitful Jewish misers who consorted with the devil; artists began to visualize such tales in grotesque and frightening detail, endowing their Jewish villains with distinctively fleshy and bestial features.
    Sara Lipton, The New York Review of Books, 17 June 2019

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