How to Use rip apart in a Sentence

rip apart

phrasal verb
  • The ship spun and fell against the rocks, which gouged and ripped apart the hull.
    David Reamer | Alaska History, Anchorage Daily News, 16 Apr. 2023
  • The water ripped apart a two-lane road and fences that ran across the top of the dam.
    Jan M. Olsen, Anchorage Daily News, 9 Aug. 2023
  • Her entire world has just been ripped apart and ripped at the seams.
    Brian Davids, The Hollywood Reporter, 18 June 2024
  • His penance is to pray the rosary — and then rip apart a pillow in the church belfry.
    Will Swaim, National Review, 6 Jan. 2024
  • Tetiana’s leg was ripped apart, and a bullet had torn through his arm.
    Marc Santora Tyler Hicks, New York Times, 18 Feb. 2024
  • Its wall was ripped apart and thrown into the river bed.
    Yousra Elbagir, NBC News, 16 Sep. 2023
  • With each pass, the star lost more mass while being slowly ripped apart.
    Ashley Strickland, CNN, 25 Apr. 2023
  • Some residents there for months had to camp in tents on the spots where Ian ripped apart their homes.
    Alyssa Lukpat, WSJ, 30 Aug. 2023
  • The album sold poorly, and it was ripped apart by critics.
    Andy Greene, Rolling Stone, 22 Apr. 2023
  • They’ve been known to throw debris, rip apart buildings, and overturn boats.
    Alec Luhn, WIRED, 21 Aug. 2024
  • Their lives were ripped apart in one of the deadliest and most destructive wars of the 21st century.
    Samar Abu Elouf Samar Abu Elouf, New York Times, 4 Feb. 2024
  • As Marvel aggressively expanded in the 2020s to fill the Disney+ pipeline, the seams began to show — and then rip apart.
    Adam B. Vary, Variety, 1 Aug. 2023
  • And seeing that getting broken down and broken down and broken down and ripped apart a little bit.
    Raven Brunner, Peoplemag, 4 Sep. 2024
  • In that constrained space, Powers imagined the wails of families ripped apart, the smells, the bellow of an auctioneer.
    Jennifer Berry Hawes, ProPublica, 16 June 2023
  • This was moments after a war in which many homes were ripped apart beyond repair or belief.
    Michelle Orange, Harper's Magazine, 12 Dec. 2023
  • That’s exactly what happened in Europe this weekend, when the nose of an Airbus jet was ripped apart by an icy storm.
    Owen Bellwood / Jalopnik, Quartz, 11 June 2024
  • Over the weekend, several roads and other structures were ripped apart.
    Ragnhildur Sigurdardottir Bloomberg (wpns), arkansasonline.com, 14 Nov. 2023
  • Every single facet of their society has been ripped apart.
    Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker, 30 Jan. 2024
  • The nearby cemetery is full of tombstones for young men who recently died; the previous year, a young man had been found ripped apart in the forest.
    Bekah Waalkes, The Atlantic, 3 Oct. 2024
  • Wisely, the directing and producing team (Downey Jr. is a producer) hands him the drapes, the carpet, and the entire household to rip apart.
    Randy Myers, The Mercury News, 10 Apr. 2024
  • That’s actually putting it lightly; his shoelace was ripped apart.
    Shawn McFarland, Dallas News, 15 May 2023
  • Trump has built a brand by ripping apart his opponents in politics, court and business.
    Candy Woodall, Baltimore Sun, 19 July 2024
  • When a star is ripped apart by the gravitational forces of a black hole, what is left of the star is heated so much by the intensity of those forces that a flare occurs.
    Elizabeth Rayne, Ars Technica, 14 Sep. 2023
  • Many of the children who participated were from countries ripped apart by conflict and war.
    Joseph Goodman, al, 27 July 2023
  • And when tragedy strikes, their family is ripped apart by sadness and uncertainty.
    Jourdain Searles, The Hollywood Reporter, 15 Sep. 2023
  • Buildings are ripped apart, like Lego structures under a toddler’s onslaught.
    Justin Chang, The New Yorker, 14 July 2024
  • Their lives were ripped apart by a shooting at a political event 13 years earlier in Arizona.
    Sean Holstege, The Arizona Republic, 13 July 2024
  • Kalamazoo County's Portage area was hard hit as a FedEx facility was ripped apart and more than a dozen mobile homes were destroyed.
    CBS News, 8 May 2024
  • Kalamazoo County’s Portage area was hard hit as a FedEx facility was ripped apart and more than a dozen mobile homes were destroyed.
    George Walker Iv, Joey Cappelletti, and Ed White, The Christian Science Monitor, 9 May 2024
  • Of the yellow-colored buildings that stood there one week ago, one was thrown up river, another was uprooted and the remaining two ripped apart.
    Deon J. Hampton, NBC News, 5 Oct. 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'rip apart.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: