How to Use subhuman in a Sentence

subhuman

1 of 2 adjective
Definition of subhumannext
Synonyms for subhumannext
  • The prisoners suffered subhuman treatment.
  • The president is proof that a subhuman nonthinking white man can one day become the leader of the free world.
    — Stephen A. Crockett Jr., The Root, 28 Feb. 2018
  • All around her, in the heart of Hollywood, people were living in subhuman conditions, sprawled beside storefronts and at bus stops.
    — Steve Lopezcolumnist, Los Angeles Times, 4 Oct. 2019
  • This is a common theme of white supremacy -- reducing nonwhites to a subhuman level through language.
    — John Blake, CNN, 17 Aug. 2019
  • Ted Nugent, vile racist who called Obama a subhuman mongrel, feted by Donald Trump.
    — Glenn Thrush, New York Times, 20 Apr. 2017
  • The stars and stripes wave over a vast concentration camp that houses ape slaves in subsimian, never mind subhuman, conditions.
    — Joe Morgenstern, WSJ, 13 July 2017
  • In 2017, in Alabama, there are public high schools named after men who thought people with darker skin than themselves were subhuman and needed to be slaves forever.
    — Joseph Goodman, AL.com, 25 May 2017
  • Africans were enslaved because of their low cost, subhuman status, and agricultural skills, Williams-Forson said.
    — Lateshia Beachum, Washington Post, 24 Aug. 2019
  • The widespread belief that Africans were not fully human, but rather subhuman, propped up the Confederacy’s defense of itself.
    — Sarah Jones, The New Republic, 20 June 2018
  • Yet new science is showing that Neanderthals weren't subhuman so much as other than human, living alongside us for many years in Europe, even interbreeding.
    — Steve Johnson, chicagotribune.com, 6 July 2017
  • Here’s just one component — research shows that the perception of black people as subhuman and ape-like directly informs the public’s view of whether police brutality against a black suspect is deserved.
    — Ellen McGirt, Fortune, 31 May 2018
  • Slaves, by contrast, were considered property, a subhuman legal status that was passed from mother to child, in perpetuity.
    — Eoin O'Carroll, The Christian Science Monitor, 16 Mar. 2018
  • In the Trumpian universe, immigrants pose a superhuman threat but are themselves of subhuman significance.
    — Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, 5 July 2019
  • The couple allegedly kept their 13 children in subhuman conditions.
    — Matt Naham, ajc, 24 Jan. 2018
  • We have been subjected to grueling and subhuman conditions.
    — Shelly Levine, sun-sentinel.com, 15 Aug. 2019
  • The history of immigration policy is filled with moments like these, when a group goes from subhuman to superhuman within a few short years, because of political winds beyond their grasp.
    — Hua Hsu, The New Yorker, 15 Feb. 2017
  • Germans used the word Untermenschen, which literally means subhuman, to describe Jews while making plans to exterminate them.
    — Katy Steinmetz, Time, 18 May 2018
  • Genocides throughout history have involved the victims being compared to something subhuman.
    — Katy Steinmetz, Time, 18 May 2018
  • Perhaps an entire information industry will be devoted to marginalizing them and calling them Nazis and reducing them to subhuman status.
    — John Kass, chicagotribune.com, 12 Sep. 2019
  • Derogatory language — where protesters term officers dogs and gangsters, and police call demonstrators subhuman and cockroaches — has become a hallmark of Hong Kong’s protests as clashes have escalated.
    — Washington Post, 4 Nov. 2019
  • Modern history is full of examples of political regimes that has described certain populations as subhuman—often to justify treating them as such.
    — Sarah Jones, The New Republic, 20 June 2018
  • Pronouncing whole categories of people as subhuman numbs a nation’s moral sense and, in extreme but, unfortunately, too many cases, becomes a rationale for collective cruelty.
    — Eugene Scott, Washington Post, 21 May 2018
  • An October 1971 exchange between a then-current and future Republican presidents is a reminder that an Oval Office occupant using language suggesting black people are inferior and subhuman is not new.
    — Eugene Scott, Twin Cities, 2 Aug. 2019
  • Americans are also prone, surveys suggest, to find their subhuman opponents extremely disagreeable.
    — The Economist, 24 May 2018
  • The remarks quickly drew criticism — widely interpreted as Trump once again characterizing Latinx immigrants as subhuman rapists and criminals.
    — German Lopez, Vox, 18 May 2018
  • His agencies have dehumanized and abused migrants, forcing them into subhuman conditions without accountability or oversight.
    — Charlie Lapastora, Fox News, 16 Aug. 2019
  • When committed by terrorists, criminals, or protesters, violence is horrific, and its perpetrators are subhuman.
    — Peter Beinart, The Atlantic, 20 Oct. 2017
  • More specifically, as criminologist John Pfaff pointed out, a willingness to accept criminals as subhuman encourages law enforcement officers to treat them accordingly, with often horrific results.
    — Dara Lind, Vox, 21 May 2018
  • The prisoners suffered subhuman treatment.
  • The president is proof that a subhuman nonthinking white man can one day become the leader of the free world.
    — Stephen A. Crockett Jr., The Root, 28 Feb. 2018
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subhuman

2 of 2 noun
  • The South fired the first shots of the Civil War out of greed, hatred, and a mass delusion that blacks were subhumans who were destined to serve whites.
    — Solomon Jones, Philly.com, 31 Oct. 2017
  • Anyone that is in country music and had to look at that bulls— today and feel subhuman.
    — Ashley Iasimone, Billboard, 27 Aug. 2022
  • These groups appear as subhumans to those taking the survey.
    — Brian Resnick, Vox, 14 Aug. 2018
  • Classes at school did not teach me about the internment of Japanese-Americans, nor about all of the rest of the groups deemed subhuman.
    — TheWeek, 6 Aug. 2020
  • In the popular press, the Irish were depicted as subhuman.
    — Michael Harriot, The Root, 17 Mar. 2018
  • Something subhuman—weaker, stranger, more destructive than the rest of us.
    — Josie Duffy Rice, The Atlantic, 12 July 2018
  • Thanks to all who have been supportive and informative! #KeepStandingUp and #youtoo to all the subhumans who have hurt people.
    — Madeleine Marr, miamiherald, 13 Dec. 2017
  • These descriptions aligned with the treatment of Black people’s bodies during the slave trade, where they were deemed both subhuman and at the same time having superhuman strength.
    — USA Today, 1 Oct. 2020
  • For 50 years, Bartholomew fought for Taino people’s rights during an era when they were seen as subhuman—a lighter, more feeble alternative to a proper Negro slave.
    — Ian Graber-Stiehl, The Root, 1 Sep. 2017
  • Criminalizing black men and deeming them subhuman, more akin to beasts in the field than white men, served to justify the brutality they were dealt, Yancy said.
    — Eliott C. McLaughlin, CNN, 3 June 2020
  • The voyages were planned with conditions so indelibly subhuman that deportees would never again want to return to the United States.
    — Julia Preston, The New York Review of Books, 22 Sep. 2020
  • In their eyes, the Eldians are a stand-in for white people in Western countries, punished for the crimes of their ancestors’ empires and besieged by subhuman monsters trying to enter their land.
    — Shaan Amin, The New Republic, 16 Nov. 2020
  • But Myanmar’s Buddhist majority drove them out in the first place, creating a climate of hate that vilified the Rohingya as subhuman.
    — Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times, 3 Nov. 2017
  • Initially, the oppressors declared that only Christians had a soul; everyone else was subhuman and could be treated as such.
    — Keith Magee, CNN, 17 May 2022
  • Here in the United States, by contrast, the enslaved were relegated to subhuman status for generations.
    — Julian Lucas, The New Yorker, 16 Sep. 2022
  • Only this farm belongs to Frank’s brother (David Andrew Nash), who exists only to make the point that today’s immigrant workers are also treated as subhuman.
    — Amy Nicholson, Variety, 23 Jan. 2022
  • Impregnatable people, in the right-wing conception, constitute a distinct, female, and subhuman class: a resource that requires domination due to the value of what can be extracted.
    — Charlotte Shane, Harper’s Magazine , 28 Sep. 2022
  • Both Armenia and Azerbaijan have marshaled musicians, Twitter and Facebook partisans, officials and lobbyists to trumpet their cause and paint the other side as subhuman killers.
    — Nabih Bulos, Los Angeles Times, 10 Nov. 2020
  • These families are vulnerable, seeking safety and asylum, but they’re being treated like subhumans.
    — Patrick Marley, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 25 June 2018
  • That assessment hit the newsstands one day after New York state troopers and other authorities gunned down 39 men in the facility’s main yard, terminating a five-day uprising ignited by subhuman, racist conditions.
    — Washington Post, 6 Oct. 2021
  • Tuesday’s change broadens the hate speech rule to forbid likening entire religious groups to subhumans or vermin, without targeting a specific individual.
    — Washington Post, 9 July 2019
  • Instead, people with viruses are represented as reckless, dangerous, and subhuman.
    — Melissa Gira Grant, The New Republic, 6 Sep. 2022
  • That incredibly deep insight explains why all women who can't experience the miracle of birth or motherhood automatically transform into subhuman troglodytes.
    — Jeremy Hsu, Discover Magazine, 22 Apr. 2016
  • The South fired the first shots of the Civil War out of greed, hatred, and a mass delusion that blacks were subhumans who were destined to serve whites.
    — Solomon Jones, Philly.com, 31 Oct. 2017
  • Anyone that is in country music and had to look at that bulls— today and feel subhuman.
    — Ashley Iasimone, Billboard, 27 Aug. 2022
  • These groups appear as subhumans to those taking the survey.
    — Brian Resnick, Vox, 14 Aug. 2018
  • Classes at school did not teach me about the internment of Japanese-Americans, nor about all of the rest of the groups deemed subhuman.
    — TheWeek, 6 Aug. 2020
  • In the popular press, the Irish were depicted as subhuman.
    — Michael Harriot, The Root, 17 Mar. 2018
  • Something subhuman—weaker, stranger, more destructive than the rest of us.
    — Josie Duffy Rice, The Atlantic, 12 July 2018
  • Thanks to all who have been supportive and informative! #KeepStandingUp and #youtoo to all the subhumans who have hurt people.
    — Madeleine Marr, miamiherald, 13 Dec. 2017

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