How to Use dramatic irony in a Sentence

dramatic irony

noun
  • This is dramatic irony, and a call-back to the use of the song at the very end of the original series.
    Jackson McHenry, Vulture, 9 Dec. 2021
  • And that dramatic irony furnishes a lot of the jokes in Good Boys.
    Alissa Wilkinson, Vox, 16 Aug. 2019
  • Even at this early point in the novel, the pages feel damp with dramatic irony.
    Ron Charles, Twin Cities, 4 Aug. 2019
  • This scene is tinged with an aura of dread and dramatic irony.
    refinery29.com, 30 May 2018
  • As a master of dramatic irony, this is a twist of fate that Mank himself would have relished.
    Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 26 Apr. 2021
  • Beliefs espoused in youth gain dramatic irony from the vantage of old age.
    Alice Gregory, The New Yorker, 9 Nov. 2020
  • Fad tries to shoot Jet, but in a nice little bit of dramatic irony, Jet uses his fake arm to block the bullet and shoots Fad instead.
    Scott Meslow, Vulture, 20 Nov. 2021
  • The shiniest pieces in Heads of the Colored People are master classes in dramatic irony.
    Brittany Allen, Longreads, 24 May 2018
  • Then there's the mission's conclusion, which includes a brand-new dose of dramatic irony.
    Sam MacHkovech, Ars Technica, 6 Apr. 2020
  • That slight moment of textbook dramatic irony has haunted me for years.
    TheWeek, 12 July 2020
  • For an adult, there’s something like dramatic irony inherent in watching a hero of this age: The idealized twelve-year-old boy sees the world in terms of good and evil.
    Christian Lorentzen, The New Republic, 21 Mar. 2018
  • Meanwhile, there was a strange pathos to Matt’s predicament, a dramatic irony in the discord between what had unfolded onscreen and off.
    Lauren Michele Jackson, The New Yorker, 16 Mar. 2021
  • If anything, Far from Home could have been that much more fun with viewers sinking their teeth into a collective sense of dramatic irony from the get-go.
    Sam MacHkovech, Ars Technica, 1 July 2019
  • The genius dramatic irony here, as loyal viewers know, is that Úrsula has a target on her back.
    Laura Zornosa, Time, 25 Oct. 2022
  • And little is made of the dramatic irony (another spoiler!) that a repetition of the act that exiled her to Pakistan is the one that brings her back home to Norway.
    Boyd Van Hoeij, The Hollywood Reporter, 25 Sep. 2017
  • In a world ruled by dramatic ironies observed by athletes of perception, to use one of Stone’s key phrases, the agents of goodness and mercy are few, and nature is no help at all.
    Charles Baxter, Harper's Magazine, 30 Mar. 2020
  • The ultimate, savage dramatic irony—the fate that the audience knows but the characters cannot—is foreshadowed in the play’s name.
    The Economist, 13 Feb. 2020
  • Moreover, Morissette was singing about the same feeling that the such classics of dramatic irony as Oedipus Rex were meant to evoke: the idea of life as a grand joke, and a sense of grim amusement at helplessness against fate.
    Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic, 7 June 2018
  • That disconnect is a kind of internal dramatic irony, where a part of us knows something another part does not.
    Emily Dreyfuss, WIRED, 4 June 2019
  • Plus, all sorts of things go on the audience will never know, lending dramatic irony to what’s actually heard.
    John Timpane, Philly.com, 13 Jan. 2018
  • Critics often note Ishiguro’s use of dramatic irony, which allows readers to know more than his characters do.
    Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic, 2 Mar. 2021
  • The pandemic has also revealed the inherent dramatic irony in trying to fit an art form defined by live performance on Zoom.
    Harry Bruinius, The Christian Science Monitor, 17 Sep. 2020
  • The budding rapper challenged White to push himself and inspired him to further hone is craft, but there is sad, dramatic irony in knowing Shakur would be gunned down at age 25 after reaching the heights of music stardom.
    Washington Post, 18 Dec. 2021
  • In Magma, though, the cumulative effect of many such self-recriminations is a sense of dramatic irony.
    Brandon Taylor, Vulture, 5 Aug. 2021
  • In the process, the game leans heavily on dramatic irony, giving a winking nod to an audience that often knows the result and coming consequences of a scene before the characters involved.
    Kyle Orland, Ars Technica, 12 June 2020
  • Ultimately, these emails — like any ancient corporate emails — are best read with an eye toward dramatic irony.
    Casey Newton, The Verge, 6 Dec. 2018
  • Winning Time has received some criticism for a possible excess of the fourth-wall-breaking, dramatic irony and genre-tweaking that are McKay’s hallmarks.
    Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter, 23 Mar. 2022
  • The film’s most powerful narrative device is a near-continuous deployment of this type of dramatic irony.
    Kevin Dettmar, The New Yorker, 23 Mar. 2022
  • Every line was written with an eye on an all-too-aware 2022 audience, substituting cheap dramatic irony for genuine drama that none of the writers figured out how to generate.
    Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter, 26 Apr. 2022
  • Most thrillers either exploit the dramatic irony of us knowing more than them or concentrate on withholding information from the audience.
    Chris Jones, chicagotribune.com, 26 July 2019

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