How to Use dismaying in a Sentence

dismaying

adjective
  • Even more dismaying for the Big Guy is the sudden awakening of his only child, Meghan.
    Ron Charles, Washington Post, 13 Sep. 2022
  • While the numbers reveal a dismaying picture, the concern is much more layered than meets the eye.
    Song Toh, Quartz, 1 Nov. 2021
  • There was a dismaying incident when a barefoot African pursued the royal car while waving what appeared to be a piece of paper.
    Moira Hodgson, WSJ, 25 Mar. 2021
  • More dismaying was the lack of pressure on Allen from a defensive front that lost Von Miller to the Bills, along with an apparently cautious secondary that didn't make enough big plays.
    Greg Beacham, ajc, 9 Sep. 2022
  • This resonant core subject makes Wright’s myriad failures of style all the more dismaying—because they’re rooted in his concept of the main character.
    Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 25 Feb. 2022
  • To an almost dismaying degree, many readers saw in Jude’s abject powerlessness a reflection of their own lives.
    The New Yorker, 10 Jan. 2022
  • That such paralyzing division has gridlocked the Senate is a dismaying turnabout for those who have long watched Oregon politics.
    Mike Baker, New York Times, 4 June 2023
  • The movie’s essential hollowness is all the more dismaying for its absurdly glorious moments of pop-iconic grandeur—most of them sharpened by Gaga’s screen-commanding gestures.
    Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 22 Nov. 2021
  • These Somebodies are seated in the audience and called onto the stage after God, unhappy with his creation, asks Death to retrieve humanity for an accounting of its dismaying conduct.
    Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times, 28 Sep. 2022
  • This recent period may be the most dismaying, and audience-repellant, of Oscar history.
    Armond White, National Review, 27 Jan. 2023
  • Her decision and its dismaying result unspool with both inevitability and surprise.
    Erin Douglass, The Christian Science Monitor, 5 Jan. 2023
  • Eventually, the exposure leads to problems for Currier and his experiments; and from there, the rest of the story unfolds with an inevitability that is either pleasing or dismaying, depending on your feelings about plot.
    Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine, 17 Aug. 2021

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