How to Use dowager in a Sentence

dowager

noun
  • The estate is owned by a wealthy dowager.
  • The guests at the wedding—the dowager, the twins, a procession.
    Sarah Mower, Vogue, 6 Oct. 2020
  • Even Maggie Smith's dowager countess would have good things to say about them.
    Julie Hinds, Detroit Free Press, 22 Jan. 2022
  • Sigourney Weaver stars as the estate’s wealthy dowager, Mrs. Haverhill.
    Manori Ravindran, Variety, 2 Nov. 2021
  • Another passenger, the dowager Lady Brabourne, died the next day.
    Victoria Murphy, Town & Country, 9 Apr. 2021
  • His dowager countess, played with the driest of wit by Maggie Smith, was unforgettable.
    Matthew Gilbert, BostonGlobe.com, 24 Oct. 2022
  • The podcast, which at five years old is practically a dowager of the medium, is not interested in breaking tabloid news.
    Rachel Syme, The New Yorker, 31 May 2021
  • Each marathon consists of half a dozen movies with some common theme: boxing, vampires, trains, heists, noirishness, Joan Crawford in dowager-empress mode.
    Mark Feeney, BostonGlobe.com, 22 Aug. 2019
  • Who would have thought musty old Fenway Park, the 105-year-old dowager of the Back Bay, would be a battleground for technological espionage?
    Tyler Kepner, New York Times, 5 Sep. 2017
  • Given the simple nature of the dowager queen’s later years, the fact that her funeral was a modest event isn’t wholly surprising.
    Meilan Solly, Smithsonian Magazine, 23 Mar. 2015
  • Being stubborn as a donkey and also the patron of one, like an eccentric dowager in a regency novel, primed me for what was to come: Sad-Donkey Autumn 2022.
    Hannah Strong, Vulture, 27 Oct. 2022
  • Weaver will co-star as his employer, a wealthy dowager, who demands that Edgerton’s character take on her wayward and troubled great-niece as a new apprentice.
    Brent Lang, Variety, 1 Sep. 2021
  • In 1943, at the opening of the Metropolitan Opera, Weegee photographed two dowagers in white furs and jewels smiling grimly at the camera, while on the darkened sideline a woman in a dirty coat and stole assesses them.
    Sarah Boxer, New York Times, 1 June 2018
  • In the last decade of her life, the empress dowager tried to polish her image by making herself more accessible, especially to Western diplomats.
    New York Times, 10 July 2018
  • After her son died in 1875, the dowager empress consolidated power by breaking with succession tradition to adopt her three-year-old nephew, who was also too young to rule.
    Lila Thulin, Smithsonian Magazine, 7 Feb. 2020
  • Its owner, by the time Caroline and Mustafa came along, was a professor of archaeology her family knew from Izmir who was looking for a buyer to take up the crumbling dowager of a property and bring it back to life.
    Carl Swanson, Town & Country, 28 Nov. 2022
  • Until February 1952, the dowager queen outranked her granddaughter.
    Los Angeles Times, 4 Feb. 2022
  • But her time with the dowager queen was brief: Katherine died in childbirth in September 1548, and her husband, clouded by accusations of impropriety and treasonous intentions, was executed less than a year later.
    Meilan Solly, Smithsonian, 3 July 2019
  • Smith has portrayed the dowager countess, Violet Crawley, a character who has become best known for her devastating zingers and obsession with maintaining tradition at Downton.
    Eliana Dockterman, Time, 20 May 2022
  • Willetta Street is an oasis populated by affluent hipsters, longtime legacy residents and the occupants of a large, pink dowager apartment building.
    Michael Kiefer, azcentral, 7 Apr. 2018

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