How to Use referent in a Sentence

referent

noun
Definition of referentnext
  • And there needs to be a clearer referent in the present.
    — Chris Jones, chicagotribune.com, 4 June 2019
  • Just to use a word is to acknowledge the absence of its referent, as though language itself makes loss our theme and medium.
    — Matthew Gavin Frank, Harper's Magazine, 21 June 2023
  • This presents certain challenges: when a sound cannot be described by its referent, language starts to falter.
    — Anna Wiener, The New Yorker, 27 June 2022
  • The other half is constructed with the memories, longing, referents, et cetera, of the readers’ lives.
    — Kathleen Rooney, chicagotribune.com, 8 Oct. 2019
  • Here, from a twenty-three-year-old, was a new tone in the language, a different way of saying, pushing back against expectations of rhythm and syntax and referent.
    — Nick Laird, The New York Review of Books, 16 Mar. 2023
  • Of course, the typical symbolic referent for the Stranger is Death or Change or God — those pesky, perennial, uninvited guests.
    — Helen Shaw, Vulture, 23 June 2022
  • Framing is an opportunity to break the tremendous power of the image in relation to its referent.
    — Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader, 16 Apr. 2018
  • In a pronoun resolution problem, the examples are ones that involve common sense in order to disambiguate the referent of the pronoun.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 28 July 2016
  • Its originators wanted to escape their subservience to real-world referents and let shape and color act as a language all their own, like musical notes.
    — Sebastian Smee, Washington Post, 5 May 2023
  • This is very unlikely to happen in the sonic dimension, because sound is ambiguous in respect with its referent.
    — Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader, 16 Apr. 2018
  • Atop the frame balance an apple and one of Crivelli’s mysterious green vegetables, which looks like an emoji for which the referent has been forgotten.
    — Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker, 9 June 2022
  • Like most graphical widgets, tabs are metaphors whose referent has been largely forgotten.
    — Meghan O'Gieblyn, WIRED, 28 Mar. 2023
  • There are hundreds of millions of people who understand this tweet, and understood its referents on every other social platform in 2018.
    — Kaitlyn Tiffany, Vox, 20 Dec. 2018
  • Nyerere even made the term Swahili a referent to Tanzanian citizenship.
    — John M. Mugane, Quartz, 5 Apr. 2022
  • That black Americans have a month set aside to honor them — outside of a white lens that has often framed them as criminal, negligent, or unworthy of historical referent — isn’t racist against anyone.
    — Jenn M. Jackson, Teen Vogue, 6 Feb. 2018
  • The question involves determining the referent of the pronoun or possessive adjective.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 19 Jan. 2015
  • As the series builds, one suspicion is that the real referent of its title is to a rational mindset born of the Enlightenment buoyed by scientific progress which, until very recently was held to be the answer to everyone’s problems.
    — John Hopewell, Variety, 27 June 2022
  • Too many college students were never taught the basic referents of liberal education.
    — Victor Davis Hanson, The Mercury News, 4 May 2017
  • The image is suggestive, a signifier without a referent.
    — Lauren Michele Jackson, The New Yorker, 29 Oct. 2022
  • The advent of social media has turned nearly every photograph into an opinion that can be refuted, rather than a referent establishing the visible facts of a situation.
    — Vogue, 12 Sep. 2022
  • Academics and conceptual artists quivered with excitement after the news broke—referent, context, appropriation, etc.
    — Hernan Diaz, Harper’s Magazine , 10 Feb. 2023

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