How to Use totem in a Sentence

totem

noun
Definition of totemnext
Synonyms for totemnext
  • Private jets are a totem of success among extremely wealthy people.
  • The Cup was a magnet, a sacred totem and a source of joy.
    — Adam Kilgore, chicagotribune.com, 8 June 2018
  • In any case, the group did take from the site 10 totem and house poles as well as smaller items.
    — Nancy Lord, Anchorage Daily News, 3 Oct. 2021
  • Liz leaps down from the risers and runs out to drag the giant totem and move the tables.
    — David Gordon, Harper's magazine, 6 Jan. 2020
  • The camera is Bing’s totem of power, her passport to the world.
    — Steven Litt, cleveland, 12 July 2020
  • In totem, Christiansen, wrote about the arts in Chicago for even longer than Weiss.
    — Chris Jones, chicagotribune.com, 8 Feb. 2018
  • We’re connected to the sea and my totem is a sea turtle.
    — Brooke Blurton, refinery29.com, 12 Dec. 2022
  • The Corvette is seen too often as an anachronism or a sad totem of mid-life crises.
    — Dan Carney, Popular Science, 2 Jan. 2020
  • The Man in Black kept the scalp with him as a totem, but how the symbol got there was never explained.
    — Bryan Bishop, The Verge, 11 June 2018
  • The movie was practically a totem of childhood in the ‘90s: MJ!
    — Andrew R. Chow, Time, 19 July 2021
  • And so the totems were born of the group’s desire to step away from the paper-swatch paint store paradigm.
    — Asad Syrkett, Curbed, 30 Nov. 2018
  • Your movie was held up as this totem of boomer nostalgia and the other movie was the fresh new thing.
    — David Marchese, New York Times, 10 June 2022
  • Keith Wolfe Smarch hand carved the totem poles that are dotted around the Commons.
    — Karen Gardiner, Condé Nast Traveler, 26 Oct. 2022
  • There is no greater totem of a time gone by than the infamous Scott Boras Binders.
    — Tom Verducci, SI.com, 2 Feb. 2018
  • This earth, scooped from the hometown of Toni Morrison is my totem.
    — Time, 7 Aug. 2019
  • Even the youthful players in this big field look to its totems who existed on the fringes.
    — Andrew Dansby, Houston Chronicle, 25 Oct. 2017
  • Good luck totems can carry a skater only so far, though.
    — JerÉ Longman, New York Times, 4 Jan. 2018
  • In the standing room only section, a flag for Third Man Records flapped in the breeze atop a handheld totem.
    — Doug MacCash, NOLA.com, 7 May 2018
  • The group has carved and painted more than 110 totem poles in the past three decades for homes for veterans, schools and other groups.
    — Washington Post, 28 Mar. 2021
  • Was the decision to put Zari 1.0 back in the totem only due to budgetary reasons?
    — Chancellor Agard, EW.com, 3 June 2020
  • On the top of the hip-hop totem poll, less is more has also become an abiding concept for Kanye West.
    — Dan Deluca, Philly.com, 22 June 2018
  • And so the book turned into a totem for Western progressives.
    — Tunku Varadarajan, WSJ, 8 Apr. 2022
  • In Ghana, kente is prized as a link between ancestry and the present, a totem of tradition.
    — Doreen St. Félix, The New Yorker, 9 June 2020
  • In that sense, the parks serve as a reminder of personal joy, a physical totem of their bliss.
    — Shirley Li, The Atlantic, 3 Aug. 2020
  • The three of us pile out of the truck in a fantastical spot, a deep canyon where erosion has turned the red-tinged canyon walls into totems.
    — Jason Harper, Condé Nast Traveler, 20 July 2018
  • We’re seated in his office, which is dark and cool and full of totems from his wide-ranging career.
    — Mickey Rapkin, Town & Country, 17 Oct. 2018
  • Indians are Asians who are white-adjacent so at the bottom of the totem poll.
    — Nicholas Confessore, New York Times, 20 Jan. 2024
  • The combat units come in the seven flavors: ranged, melee, totem, assassin, tank, trap and spell.
    — Gieson Cacho, The Mercury News, 13 June 2024
  • By then, though, Shamo was a dark-net totem, the model for aspiring dons in every suburb.
    — Paul Solotaroff, Rolling Stone, 17 June 2024
  • Eagle-eyed fans spotted Travis sporting a couple of friendship bracelets — a totem of Swift's fanbase — while strolling around the festival.
    — Hedy Phillips, Peoplemag, 21 June 2024

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