How to Use martinet in a Sentence

martinet

noun
  • The prison's warden was a cruel martinet.
  • From martinets like the Karolyis, Bela and Marta, to this creep Nassar, the beauty of the sport was truly skin deep.
    Paul Daugherty, Cincinnati.com, 16 Jan. 2018
  • Paul was not a tyrannical father pushing his son like a martinet.
    Marcos Bretón, sacbee, 25 Sep. 2017
  • Even that old windbag Polonius, played by Robert Joy, is less a bombastic grandstander than a dry-as-dust martinet.
    Ben Brantley, New York Times, 23 Jan. 2018
  • As a war president, Wilson was both moralist and martinet.
    Richard Norton Smith, WSJ, 19 Apr. 2018
  • Evelyn Gresham is a successful lawyer and something of a martinet.
    Cressida Connolly, WSJ, 23 Oct. 2020
  • The martinet head coach earned back-to-back last-place divisional finishes and the undying enmity of his players.
    Jack Dickey, SI.com, 23 Aug. 2017
  • The Trump administration doesn’t believe in climate change, so some White House martinet ordered the Badlands account to go silent.
    Alexander Nazaryan, Newsweek, 15 Feb. 2017
  • The sovereign, a playboy martinet, demands nothing less.
    The Economist, 19 Oct. 2019
  • Tuomanen also plays Cassius, a martinet, envious, too ready to take offense, a source of comic energy.
    John Timpane, Philly.com, 25 Mar. 2018
  • Roberts, a flinty, fastidious martinet with a hardscrabble background and a knack for making himself indispensable to powerful men, befriended Jones and took up the cause.
    Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker, 14 June 2019
  • His father, a martinet but also a stabilizing influence, died when Hernandez was in college.
    Paul Daugherty, Cincinnati.com, 21 Jan. 2020

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