How to Use defile in a Sentence

defile

verb
Definition of defilenext
Synonyms for defilenext
  • To the very end no image of Churchill defiles the sanctity of this film’s safe space.
    — Dorothy Rabinowitz, WSJ, 20 July 2017
  • Even so, the Pope disbanded the order since the whole heresy mess had defiled its name.
    — National Geographic, 12 May 2016
  • He was charged with murder, rape and abduction with the intent to defile.
    — Steve Helling, PEOPLE.com, 17 Nov. 2021
  • And there might have been just a little pity for the desperate, cornered liar who’d defiled his office.
    — Peggy Noonan, WSJ, 29 Nov. 2018
  • Besides homicide, he also was found guilty of rape and of defiling corpses.
    — Chris Buckley, New York Times, 30 Mar. 2018
  • The Seleucids captured the holy Temple and defiled it by erecting an altar to the Greek god Zeus inside.
    — Amy Briggs, National Geographic, 19 Dec. 2019
  • Defiled and broken as the once-great automobile capital can seem, the past five years have seen great progress.
    — Kat Bein, Billboard, 31 May 2017
  • Pornography destroys the purity of the mind of the individual and defiles the conscience of the Nation.
    — Leah Sottile, Longreads, 20 July 2019
  • Other cities defiled their lakefronts, but Chicago didn’t.
    — John Kass, chicagotribune.com, 12 June 2019
  • The sublime defiled, the sacred embedded in a thing of vanity, ridiculed, pirated, usurped, stolen.
    — Cynthia Ozick, The New Yorker, 24 July 2023
  • Ghost nets entangling turtles, plastic bags defiling corals, and straws in the guts of fish existed in a different world.
    — Jenni Marsh, CNN, 7 June 2018
  • His contempt for tourists and transplants who don’t abide the old folkways is uncompromised — young people show up to get drunk and defile the East Village, never to teach poor children in Brownsville.
    — Ginia Bellafante, New York Times, 27 Sep. 2017
  • Police charged Brevard with abduction with intent to defile in the Homewood Suites attack.
    — Washington Post, 27 Mar. 2022
  • And the lighthearted music at the opera’s end was defied — defiled? — by a heavy-handed upstage military assault.
    — Scott Cantrell, Dallas News, 30 Mar. 2023
  • Always expect to be disturbed, defiled and maybe even delighted.
    — Katie Walsh, Twin Cities, 4 July 2019
  • Both journeys displayed how the forest was being defiled and colonised by outsiders: rubber-seekers who bled the trees and massacred the tribes, crazed religious sects.
    — The Economist, 28 May 2020
  • As Charlier and his co-authors wrote in their paper last week, Hitler had demanded in his will that the Soviet forces about to overrun Berlin not be allowed to defile his corpse.
    — Avi Selk, Washington Post, 20 May 2018
  • Three years earlier, a mother of five from Punjab was convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to hang, after she was accused of defiling the name of the Prophet Mohammed.
    — Sophia Saifi, CNN, 17 Aug. 2023
  • Krystal wouldn’t be defiled this early Tuesday morning — not after that Monday night.
    — Michael Casagrande | McAsagrande@al.com, al, 14 Jan. 2020
  • The quick answer is that seven-inning games defile the traditions of what has been America’s most-traditional game.
    — Patrick Reusse, Star Tribune, 15 Aug. 2020
  • Earlier this summer, a German visitor defiled a temple by roaming through it without a stitch of clothes.
    — Christopher Elliott | On Travel, Anchorage Daily News, 13 July 2023
  • To plow it over is to defile the type of humanistic giving that has become scarce in our increasingly billionaires-take-all way of American life.
    — Maria Panaritis, Philly.com, 2 June 2018
  • His family, citing their Muslim faith, which doesn’t allow for bodies to be defiled after death, did not allow his brain to be analyzed.
    — Tod Leonard, sandiegouniontribune.com, 12 Dec. 2017
  • The song describes a royal procession during the Raj Jat—a pilgrimage held in the region every 12 years to worship the goddess Nanda Devi—that defiled the holy landscape with dancing girls.
    — Kristin Romey, National Geographic, 20 Aug. 2019
  • Earlier this summer, a German visitor defiled a temple by roaming through it without wearing a stitch of clothes.
    — Christopher Elliott, Dallas News, 12 July 2023
  • For the past decade, seeing women who look like me — Asian women — in sexual contexts has meant seeing women who look like me being abused, dominated, and defiled.
    — Maureen O’Connor, The Cut, 11 June 2017
  • Yet even if one were inclined to defend their tactics—and argue, for example, that the activists showed admirable restraint by choosing to defile paintings that were protected by a pane of glass—the protests still fail on their own terms.
    — Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic, 27 Oct. 2022
  • As one of the most popular game reserves in the country, Sibuya is unfortunately familiar with poachers and their efforts to kill and defile rare animals.
    — Kelli Bender, PEOPLE.com, 5 July 2018
  • Inside, what was once the pinnacle of aspirational luxury in New York has been defiled by bankruptcy.
    — Kim Bhasin, chicagotribune.com, 6 Dec. 2019
  • Allegiances shift and high jinks ensue as our cursing, sword-swinging protagonist gets incarcerated, blown up, shot, stabbed, defiled and maimed in order to do the right thing.
    — Brian Truitt, USA TODAY, 14 May 2018

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