How to Use belligerence in a Sentence

belligerence

noun
  • And with each new act of belligerence, experts and the media have scrambled to make sense of what comes next.
    Lorraine Boissoneault, Smithsonian, 28 July 2017
  • Rodimer’s belligerence hasn’t been limited to the wrestling ring.
    Gilbert Garcia, San Antonio Express-News, 19 Mar. 2021
  • Some would call it belligerence; some would call it strong-minded and sort of inspiring.
    Vulture, 7 Jan. 2022
  • Outraged by the army’s belligerence, a group of Kachin youths held protests in Myitkyina.
    The Economist, 17 May 2018
  • And later, in his drunken belligerence, Alex’s scorned ex-lover challenged Spencer to a duel on the first night of a three-week voyage to London.
    Brian Davids, The Hollywood Reporter, 26 Feb. 2023
  • Amid the speculation, the focus of Trump's belligerence, North Korea, remained silent in the hours after the speech.
    Foster Klug, The Christian Science Monitor, 20 Sep. 2017
  • The Taliban, for its part, seemed to relish the new belligerence the group’s violence has aroused in Washington and Kabul.
    Washington Post, 30 Jan. 2018
  • The belligerence may not only be coming from the American side.
    Alex Ward, Vox, 18 June 2019
  • Yet Iran’s belligerence is not the outcome of a book-keeping exercise.
    The Economist, 12 May 2018
  • And that will be part of Biden's mission over the next week -- to unify the region around Taiwan as a deterrent to any Chinese belligerence.
    Brad Lendon, CNN, 19 May 2022
  • As the suspense builds, the dead-eyed little monsters pick off the adults one-by-one, using their mama-bear instincts and base male belligerence against them.
    Joyce Bautista Ferrari, Marie Claire, 28 Nov. 2019
  • Jabotinsky argued that Jews must create their state and face the belligerence of Arab leadership head on.
    Benny Avni, WSJ, 13 Dec. 2020
  • He has been knocked, including here, for his belligerence.
    Peggy Noonan, WSJ, 8 Oct. 2020
  • The nation’s nuclear stance is back to belligerence, one more significant turn for the worse in a world suddenly full of turns for the worse.
    Teju Cole, New York Times, 11 Apr. 2017
  • The interns didn’t want to be alone with Les Miles, and Ed Orgeron was walking, breathing belligerence by the end and both of those guys won national titles.
    Joseph Goodman | Jgoodman@al.com, al, 20 Oct. 2021
  • The protesters' focus has turned to the behavior of the police and the belligerence of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan.
    Cnt Editors, Condé Nast Traveler, 6 Oct. 2022
  • Music that bleeds with the apocalyptic collisions of bounce beat-era go-go and the lyrical belligerence of drill.
    Alphonse Pierre, Pitchfork, 17 Nov. 2023
  • Russian belligerence has reached such a fervor that the chairman of the Duma recently raised the prospect of taking back Alaska.
    Luke Mogelson, The New Yorker, 23 July 2022
  • This newspaper would welcome an end to Iranian belligerence and to the regime itself, but a wish based on a hunch is not a policy.
    The Economist, 12 May 2018
  • Bluster isn’t beating the virus; belligerence isn’t calming a restive nation.
    Calvin Woodward, The Denver Post, 5 July 2020
  • But there are, and should be, limits on the exercise of both compromise, and of principled belligerence.
    Michael Peregrine, Forbes, 6 Jan. 2023
  • For not wanting to be nonbelligerent by naming the terms for belligerence.
    Solmaz Sharif, The New Yorker, 21 Feb. 2022
  • But one valuable lesson Democrats should learn from Trump here is how much can be accomplished with sheer shameless belligerence.
    Ryan Cooper, TheWeek, 19 Nov. 2020
  • The former man is calmer and almost hippie-like, while the latter favors confrontation and belligerence.
    Sam MacHkovech, Ars Technica, 11 June 2017
  • The desire to punish belligerence—and to subordinate other geopolitical goals to that cause—is once again in the air.
    Jordan Michael Smith, The New Republic, 20 Apr. 2022
  • But for the most part, his belligerence and incoherence was treated as a point of fact, rather than an unprecedented horror show.
    Alex Shephard, The New Republic, 27 June 2019
  • Mr Trump’s belligerence has probably helped the latter.
    The Economist, 30 Sep. 2017
  • There are incidents of overcrowding on weekends but acts of belligerence are rare.
    Christine Spolar, National Geographic, 29 July 2020
  • What is easy for the new generation to miss is that the original logo had just a mild undertaste of belligerence to it, like bitters in an Old-Fashioned.
    Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 23 Mar. 2023
  • Those symptoms include belligerence, anxiety and paranoia—all of which could make one more likely to commit a crime.
    Michael McCann, SI.com, 16 June 2018

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