How to Use pitiless in a Sentence

pitiless

adjective
  • The soldiers were pitiless toward their enemy.
  • But the apex of peace and love and the abyss of pitiless violence were born out of similar drives as old as the U.S. itself.
    San Diego Union-Tribune, 13 Aug. 2019
  • The pitiless spotlights glaring above did little to help the matter.
    David Weiss, Newsweek, 18 Oct. 2017
  • Here, as throughout, the framing remains steady, a visual choice that can feel like a long, hard, pitiless stare.
    Manohla Dargis, New York Times, 8 Feb. 2018
  • Out in the woods, under the pelting of a pitiless storm, a middle-aged American male, stripped to the waist, fights a furious bear.
    Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 24 Feb. 2023
  • There’s no other game on the market like Sea of Thieves, which simulates the life of a pirate by pitting the player against the pitiless sea.
    Matthew Gault, Time, 5 Feb. 2020
  • There is brief room here for men too, as both pitiless detractors and vague supporters of Hilma’s work.
    Tomris Laffly, Variety, 30 Mar. 2023
  • Many people ran but some stood their ground and put up a fight, throwing things at the attackers to try to halt or at least slow their pitiless rampage.
    Alexander Smith, NBC News, 5 June 2017
  • Horror? Pitiless tsk-tsking from snooty British scolds?
    Maria Puente, USA TODAY, 6 July 2017
  • The abolition of a pitiless world through pitilessness.
    Rumaan Alam, The New Republic, 21 June 2023
  • No one wants to think about this now, but eventually our old friend Adam Smith will come calling to collect his inevitable and pitiless fee.
    The Editorial Board, WSJ, 2 Sep. 2020
  • The competition is pitiless; only three per cent pass muster each year, while the rest barely manage to subsist.
    Jiayang Fan, The New Yorker, 21 Apr. 2017
  • Whatever rough beast Yeats had seen had already slouched its way out of the desert, laying waste to everything that fell under its pitiless, blank gaze.
    Colin Dickey, Longreads, 31 Aug. 2017
  • The writer’s calling is to set that memory in the amber of his prose; in Proust’s pitiless formulation, art is all, life is nothing.
    Ryu Spaeth, The New Republic, 4 May 2018
  • And Trump, like Cohn, got away with it all under the ostensibly pitiless magnifying glass of New York.
    Frank Rich, Daily Intelligencer, 29 Apr. 2018
  • With her lion mane and second-skin catsuit, Jayne, who tries hard to affect pitiless self-interest on the series, seemed smaller, near to sweet.
    Doreen St. Félix, The New Yorker, 17 Nov. 2023
  • El Akkad has done nothing less than reveal how a curious girl evolves into a pitiless fighter.
    The Washington Post, OregonLive.com, 30 May 2017
  • Yet what happens when power descends, razing that village to the ground and remaking it in its own pitiless image?
    Manohla Dargis, New York Times, 30 Mar. 2023
  • Football training camp is drudgery under a pitiless summer sun.
    Gary Peterson, The Mercury News, 10 July 2019
  • As far as Hollywood is concerned, Anastasia wasn’t shot or stabbed in a pitiless slaughter.
    Nancy Bilyeau, Town & Country, 25 Apr. 2017
  • Notably, the most prominent object on that nightstand isn’t a book but an iPhone, whose alarm goes off at 5:50 A.M., jolting Angela out of a few hours’ slumber and into the pitiless glare of a new day.
    Justin Chang, The New Yorker, 22 Mar. 2024
  • Others take the voice of Charles, directing an impassioned j’accuse against his pitiless creator.
    Sam Sacks, WSJ, 6 Sep. 2018
  • William, however, still bears the scars of the pitiless coverage of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, which ended with her death in a car accident in Paris in 1997, pursued by the paparazzi.
    Mark Landler, New York Times, 7 Feb. 2024
  • One’s eye is at first dazzled, then sated, and eventually tired by this pitiless inflation of scale.
    Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 22 Oct. 2021
  • On Wednesday, in front of a loud and hostile crowd at Rogers Centre, the Indians took another step on the road to erasing almost seven decades of pitiless failure.
    David Waldstein, New York Times, 19 Oct. 2016
  • That unlucky sojourner happens to be the one person here that otherwise pitiless Adem cannot bear losing.
    Dennis Harvey, Variety, 5 Feb. 2024
  • Prices dropped to less than $10 a barrel, triggering a pitiless industry shakeout.
    Jack Farchy, Bloomberg.com, 5 May 2020
  • For a time, the caliphate really did exist: a terrifying medieval prophecy sprung to life and captured in the pitiless freeze-frames of propaganda videos.
    Nabih Bulos, latimes.com, 14 July 2017
  • More important, the anguish, the fury, and the deceit that the affair unleashes—and the pitiless precision with which Breillat films them—provide a surer and clearer judgment on the action.
    Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 6 Oct. 2023
  • Nabokov started to seem less like a lovable, bumbling Professor Pnin and more like a pitiless White Russian with a monocle and an ebony cigarette holder.
    Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, 7 Dec. 2020

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