How to Use shoal in a Sentence

shoal

noun
  • It was attacked by Lakota Sioux while the crew worked the boat off the shoal.
    Washington Post, 4 Feb. 2022
  • Strutting along the muddy shoal, these rangy punks of the bird world were white, with only a hint of pink.
    Washington Post, 9 Mar. 2022
  • The Warren Sawyer struck a shoal near the island and ran aground on its south shore, Schwanfelder said.
    Shannon Larson, BostonGlobe.com, 28 Feb. 2023
  • Do the birds in a flock, or the fish in a shoal, just enjoy each other's company?
    Elizabeth Preston, Discover Magazine, 23 July 2012
  • How do the sharks react to these shoals of wetsuited humans?
    Dag Goering, Smithsonian Magazine, 2 June 2023
  • Pinch an Inch of Nightcrawler When the heavy walleyes move on to the big-water shoals in the late summer, try going after them with a bucktail jig and a 1-inch pinch of nightcrawler.
    Will Ryan, Field & Stream, 5 July 2023
  • While the Wager was navigating this traffic, her keel ran aground on a shoal.
    David Grann, The New Yorker, 28 Feb. 2023
  • At least eight of the dead were children who perished after a wooden boat broke up in stormy seas on the shoals off the Calabrian coast Sunday.
    Paolo Santalucia and Luigi Navarra, Anchorage Daily News, 27 Feb. 2023
  • There, just rising over a mountain peak was the star cluster Pleiades — the Seven Sisters — a stunning shoal of sapphires.
    Peter M. Leschak, Star Tribune, 15 May 2021
  • Cairo points out the areas where the most trout can be found—where the water foams up, or the dark shadow where a shallow shoal drops off into a deeper channel.
    Meredith Erickson, Saveur, 29 Apr. 2019
  • In the coastal waters of Laguna, Brazil, a shoal of mullet is in serious trouble.
    Ed Yong, Discover Magazine, 1 May 2012
  • Monét is still navigating the shoals of almost-stardom.
    August Brown, Los Angeles Times, 11 Oct. 2023
  • During the mission on Saturday, the Philippine fisheries vessels moved a few yards away from the shoal after being blocked by the Chinese boats.
    Camille Elemia, New York Times, 11 Dec. 2023
  • For one thing, spring flooding was tamer than usual, which means less river sediment pushed into new shoals.
    USA TODAY, 10 Sep. 2023
  • For years, the Philippines largely stood by as Chinese forces rammed its fishing vessels and occupied the reefs and shoals that once belonged to the Southeast Asian nation.
    Camille Elemia, New York Times, 20 Feb. 2023
  • The fighter planes shift into battle formation and send alerts to fleets of robot ships and shoals of autonomous submarines in the Black, Barents and White Seas.
    Noel Sharkey, Scientific American, 1 Feb. 2020
  • More From Popular Mechanics Various parts of the sea are claimed by all six countries, many of which also claim the islets, shoals, and reefs peppering the region.
    Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, 28 Aug. 2023
  • After the confrontation last weekend, China claimed the Philippines had violated its sovereignty by grounding the ship on the shoal.
    Brad Lendon, CNN, 12 Aug. 2023
  • In a community, a herd or a shoal, the other individuals around you affect how you're perceived.
    Elizabeth Preston, Discover Magazine, 7 Dec. 2011
  • His comments follow increasingly assertive moves by the Philippines to protect its claim to shoals in the South China Sea during more than a month of high-stakes maritime drama.
    Ivan Watson, CNN, 29 Sep. 2023
  • The Dominion lawsuit, filed in 2021, at first seemed to produce little effect at the network, which may well have assumed that this suit, like most defamation cases, would crash on the shoals of Times V. Sullivan.
    Jim Rutenberg, New York Times, 6 Apr. 2023
  • There are occasional cutaways to scenes of nature (lush gardens, rocky shoals), which help break up the 80-minute movie but feel too literal-minded to have been necessary.
    Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 25 Apr. 2023
  • The South China Sea, however, is bereft of islands of any real significance, with most qualifying, at best, as atolls, islets, and shoals.
    Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, 28 Aug. 2023
  • Beyond the breathtaking water, the beauty of Dry Tortugas National Park can be found in its unique natural features (think: coral reefs, sandy shoals, sea life, and lots of birds).
    Skye Sherman, Travel + Leisure, 20 Feb. 2023
  • The team then collected 20 juvenile bonnethead sharks—a species known to migrate hundreds of kilometers—from a shoal off the Florida coast.
    Nikk Ogasa, Science | AAAS, 6 May 2021
  • Next, Reddon focused on individuals who were in the middle of their shoal’s pecking order.
    Ed Yong, Discover Magazine, 10 Oct. 2012
  • Since the 2010 campaign, however, Republican Senate chances have run aground on the shoals of bad candidacies.
    Matthew Continetti, National Review, 18 Feb. 2023
  • My oyster journey began as a kid bobbing in a pirogue boat in the Gulf, where my uncle hopped out in waist-deep water and pried them off the shoal, shucked them with a screwdriver and handed them over with Tabasco, crackers and warm Coors beer.
    Mike Sutter, San Antonio Express-News, 11 Mar. 2021
  • Our empathy, and curiosity, keep crashing up against the rocky shoals of enervation.
    Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 31 Jan. 2024
  • Living here are shoals of technicolor fish, some the size of a fingernail—like the baby clownfish hiding in gently swaying anemone—others larger than a human, like the giant moray eel coiled around net fire coral.
    Jessica Vincent, Vogue, 25 Oct. 2023

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