How to Use pernicious in a Sentence

pernicious

adjective
  • More pernicious still has been the acceptance of the author's controversial ideas by the general public.
  • She thinks television has a pernicious influence on our children.
  • Some of those forms are even more pernicious than the old forms.
    New York Times, 4 May 2018
  • And on the raging ocean main, Amid the stormy waves of death, And in the desert hurricane, And in the Plague’s pernicious breath.
    The Economist, 4 June 2020
  • Of all the circumstances in this case, that may be the most pernicious.
    Lucien Bruggeman, ABC News, 21 Feb. 2020
  • This leads to the most pernicious effect of the argument.
    John Ryder, WSJ, 2 Oct. 2017
  • Such a frame of mind is pernicious for the future of both our nations.
    Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, National Review, 17 Nov. 2020
  • The third, and perhaps most pernicious, myth is that nothing can be done about it.
    The Economist, 17 Oct. 2019
  • It has been called the new Jim Crow because of these pernicious effects.
    Indianapolis Star, The Indianapolis Star, 17 June 2020
  • But there is a long and pernicious history in the South that cannot be ignored.
    ELLE, 11 Oct. 2022
  • For most of us, our most pernicious villain is our self.
    Marisha Pessl, New York Times, 25 Oct. 2017
  • Of all the health myths in the world, the idea that there is a silver bullet for weight loss may be among the most persistent and pernicious.
    Korin Miller, SELF, 2 Jan. 2019
  • To his credit, Rhodes does not pretend to have all of the answers about how to stop such pernicious trends.
    Washington Post, 11 June 2021
  • Many of the series' most pernicious bugbears have been dumped.
    Daniel Starkey, Ars Technica, 28 Oct. 2017
  • But in some ways, the effects of these glowing bedmates seem to be a bit more pernicious.
    Brian Fagan, The Conversation, 13 Sep. 2019
  • It was designed to be more resistant to one of the most pernicious diseases in the fruit world — apple scab.
    Connie Nelson, Star Tribune, 17 Feb. 2021
  • But the most pernicious forms of the disease are the kind exhibited by Ditka.
    Author: Mary Schmich, Alaska Dispatch News, 13 Oct. 2017
  • And that’s the pernicious problem of having so many teams tanking in baseball.
    Dave Hyde, Sun-Sentinel.com, 14 Apr. 2018
  • How close to the pernicious doctrine of the blue-eyed Aryan ideal of humanity?
    Henry Louis Gates Jr., The New York Review of Books, 21 Mar. 2019
  • For the first time, the party was no longer considered the most pernicious for French democracy.
    Constant Méheut, New York Times, 10 Nov. 2022
  • The closest wildfire was 85 miles away, but smoke can be pernicious in its effects on wine grapes.
    Esther Mobley, San Francisco Chronicle, 19 May 2021
  • The former threat seems easier to spot, but the two are equally pernicious.
    John Bolton, WSJ, 13 Apr. 2021
  • But that very fact is one of the reasons why conflicts of interest are so pernicious.
    Frida Ghitis, CNN, 19 May 2017
  • And perhaps all that had brought him back to his old haunts in Shinagawa, back to his former, pernicious habits.
    Haruki Murakami, The New Yorker, 1 June 2020
  • The study highlights just how pernicious this metal can be, even at low levels.
    chicagotribune.com, 19 July 2021
  • More pernicious is the fact that so few people realize that this could be a problem.
    Michael Waters, Wired, 31 Mar. 2020
  • And the threat of wildfire — which, by this time last year, had ruined grapes up and down the state with pernicious smoke — remains on everyone's mind.
    Esther Mobley, San Francisco Chronicle, 16 Sep. 2021
  • The Clarks offered the results as proof of the pernicious effects of segregation.
    Ernie Suggs, ajc, 8 Feb. 2022
  • That’s not a winning argument right now in Dallas, where City Hall is drowning in broken systems that have failed to fix pernicious problems.
    Dallas News, 18 Nov. 2022
  • In others, a softball lobbed to appease the masses demanding racial justice, a superficial solution to persistent and pernicious social issues.
    Aronte Bennett, Forbes, 3 June 2022

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