How to Use charnel in a Sentence
charnel
noun-
In the vicarage garden, the bodies in the charnel mound have gone back to sleep.
—Joshua Levine, Smithsonian Magazine, 30 Mar. 2022
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Museum collections may look like a creepy charnel house to outsiders, full of corpses, pins, and mothballs.
—Gwen Pearson, WIRED, 24 Sep. 2015
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Though cremation has since solved the burial space issue, Hallstatt townspeople can choose to send their remains to the charnel house.
—Danielle Page, National Geographic, 4 Nov. 2019
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For all the talk of internationalist duty, the Afghanistan that the Soviets left behind was a charnel ground.
—Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker, 1 Sep. 2021
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Isotope dating studies of the bodies in the vicarage charnel mound found wide disparities.
—Joshua Levine, Smithsonian Magazine, 30 Mar. 2022
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Down the row, past the typical stacks of bones and skulls found in charnel houses, the body of a woman was so well preserved that her nose still protruded outward from her face, some three hundred years after her death.
—Caitlin Doughty, Time, 4 Oct. 2017
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An honorable soldier, Lee is an apt symbol for the Confederate rank and file whose sacrifices in the war’s charnel house shouldn’t be flushed down the memory hole.
—Rich Lowry, National Review, 15 Aug. 2017
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If Dickens’s body of work is a virtual charnel house, Jane Austen is famous for never killing off a single major character.
—Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic, 16 Sep. 2020
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Blood and wreckage was distributed over the entire ship, the after cabin and the vicinity of the ship adjacent to the exploded boiler resembling a charnel house.
—San Diego Union-Tribune, 21 July 2019
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There’s a reason Buddhist monks meditate on charnel grounds, and why Cicero said the contemplation of death was the beginning of philosophy.
—Parul Sehgal, New York Times, 26 June 2018
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Many of those felled in the drug war are expected to meet the same ending as generations of impoverished Filipinos before: stuffed in rice sacks and stored in charnel houses or dumped in piles, mixed with rubble and gravel on the cemetery floor.
—Los Angeles Times, 3 Mar. 2021
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Similar charnel houses were created in Catholic cemeteries all across Europe.
—Jennifer Billock, Smithsonian, 15 Sep. 2017
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Connecting the Alps and the Adriatic, this hiking trail showcases the heritage of the Isonzo Front, including fortifications, military cemeteries and charnel houses, alongside the region’s stunning natural scenery.
—Washington Post, 27 Nov. 2019
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'charnel.' 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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