How to Use doctrinaire in a Sentence

doctrinaire

1 of 2 adjective
  • Back in the early aughts, during the height of the poker boom, the secrets of the game were both doctrinaire and vague.
    — Jay Caspian Kang, The New Yorker, 11 Oct. 2024
  • One of the reasons for Maresz’s non-doctrinaire style may come from the breadth of his education.
    — Russell Platt, The New Yorker, 20 Apr. 2017
  • Its leaders become priests who shepherd their flocks according to the doctrinaire agenda of their faith.
    — Letters To The Editor, The Mercury News, 15 Nov. 2024
  • Mann isn’t a doctrinaire reviser of his previous work, someone who simply likes to futz.
    — James Wolcott, VanityFair.com, 15 May 2017
  • This is all moot now that Kennedy is gone, sure to be replaced by a more doctrinaire supporter of capital punishment.
    — Dylan Matthews, Vox, 11 July 2018
  • Garvey was conservative, but not doctrinaire, and liked the idea of being a leader who brought people together.
    — David Lightman, Sacramento Bee, 23 Apr. 2024
  • Yet both sides of the weight-loss debate became attached to impossibly doctrinaire positions.
    — Helen Lewis, The Atlantic, 22 Mar. 2026
  • Krauthammer’s views weren’t always doctrinaire and sometimes cut across the political divide.
    — Lukas I. Alpert, WSJ, 22 June 2018
  • Such preachy, doctrinaire, often repellant art may be made to draw attention to this or that social issue, but it is surely not produced to entertain.
    — Peter Tonguette, Washington Examiner - Political News and Conservative Analysis About Congress, the President, and the Federal Government, 14 Mar. 2025
  • Finally, doctrinaire Republicans for decades mouthed orthodoxies of free rather than fair trade.
    — Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 7 Nov. 2019
  • But its message for young women may have evolved into something slightly less doctrinaire, and perhaps even less explicitly political.
    — Elaine Godfrey, The Atlantic, 9 June 2026
  • But running as a doctrinaire progressive with heavy-handed appeals to minorities, the young and unmarried women is a perilous strategy at best.
    — Karl Rove, WSJ, 23 May 2018
  • And there’s this thing that often happens on the left when a Black person has views that aren’t doctrinaire or aren’t the views a white progressive thinks a Black person is supposed to have.
    — Sean Illing, Vox, 9 Nov. 2024
  • The four day psyche-fest was a bonanza of seminars, from the doctrinaire to the esoteric, the practical to the political.
    — Penelope Green, New York Times, 17 Feb. 2018
  • The give-and-take of an earlier era, when Lew Wasserman and his Universal crowd, for instance, played both sides gave way to a doctrinaire intensity.
    — Michael Cieply, Deadline, 14 July 2024
  • Because of the way our population is distributed, Democrats can't afford to enforce the kind of doctrinaire purity that the tea party was so successful in policing.
    — Aaron Blake, Washington Post, 26 Apr. 2017
  • Many conservative critics long for Benedict's more doctrinaire papacy and question his decision to resign.
    — Fox News, 21 Sep. 2018
  • Even leaving these facts aside, neither the doctrinaire socialism nor militant Islam have ever improved any place on earth, and New York City will not be the first.
    — Newsweek Contributors, MSNBC Newsweek, 5 Nov. 2025
  • Domestic opponents portray Petro as a doctrinaire Communist bent on violence, but that depiction is overblown.
    — Ken Silverstein, The New Republic, 20 Apr. 2023
  • Political without being doctrinaire, Red Clocks expands the dimensions of our most pressing social debate.
    — Ron Charles, Philly.com, 28 Jan. 2018
  • Speaking of then and now, that party almost immediately split into warring factions, with a compromise-averse, more doctrinaire left wing challenged by more pragmatic moderates.
    — Phil Primack, BostonGlobe.com, 14 June 2019
  • Murdoch’s media muscle has been increasingly buttressed by his Wall Street Journal revenues as well as those of the doctrinaire Fox News.
    — Peter Bart, Deadline, 11 Sep. 2025
  • The Securitate enforced the doctrinaire policies of Ceausescu, including strict limits on the media, dissent and freedom of speech.
    — Matt Schudel, Washington Post, 30 Sep. 2017
  • Many liberals correctly call Pence a doctrinaire conservative, particularly on gay rights and other social issues.
    — The Tylt, cleveland.com, 19 Oct. 2017
  • Many liberals correctly call Pence a doctrinaire conservative, particularly on gay rights and other social issues.
    — Dana Milbank, The Mercury News, 7 June 2017
  • Just as Johnson has alienated some Conservative moderates, Corbyn has lost the backing of some longtime Labour figures who are turned off by his doctrinaire approach.
    — Washington Post, 10 Sep. 2019
  • Malcolm’s subjects are very old-school, doctrinaire, rigid Freudian psychoanalysts who get involved in impossibly obscure academic debates.
    — The New Yorker, New Yorker, 28 Jan. 2026
  • And both have been criticized by fundamentalist and other more conservative religious thinkers who accuse them of not hewing to the most stringently doctrinaire biblical literalism.
    — Alex Johnson, NBC News, 2 Mar. 2018
  • The moderates who ended up on the high court, to the occasional chagrin of conservatives who dream of radical change being handed down by a more doctrinaire majority, helped mask a deeper rightward shift on the court from liberals’ point of view.
    — Matt Ford, The New Republic, 10 May 2023
  • The best-case scenario is another Mike Pompeo, a doctrinaire crusading conservative with a light resume and a very brown nose who has quietly expanded his State department portfolio beyond its normal scope.
    — Adam Weinstein, The New Republic, 10 Sep. 2019

doctrinaire

2 of 2 noun
  • Voters in the city want out of the suicide pact that is doctrinaire progressivism.
    — The Editorial Board, WSJ, 17 June 2022
  • Here, too, Bennett chafed against more doctrinaire elements, Plesner said.
    — Washington Post, 5 June 2021
  • The problem is Oz hasn't always been a doctrinaire conservative.
    — Joel Mathis, The Week, 11 Apr. 2022
  • Even so, enforcement by the government itself is sometimes less doctrinaire in practice than in theory.
    — Rachel Donadio, The Atlantic, 22 Nov. 2021
  • Surely even the most doctrinaire musicologist would say just to aim in the general vicinity of the metronome markings.
    — Scott Cantrell, Dallas News, 24 July 2020
  • Such doctrinaire assumptions would exclude three quarters of world literature.
    — Wisława Szymborska, The New York Review of Books, 3 Aug. 2021
  • Few classes of creative people are as doctrinaire about dress as architects and interior designers.
    — Jessica Iredale, Town & Country, 7 Apr. 2022
  • Thus the self-seekers and the doctrinaires were drawn together into an alliance to maintain the status quo, and all its abuses and inequalities were made sacrosanct.
    — Foreign Affairs, 18 Dec. 2011
  • Although much influenced by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in all the best ways, Jahn was no doctrinaire modernist.
    — Rick Kogan, chicagotribune.com, 16 Dec. 2021
  • Biden’s economic record is that of an internationalist—not a doctrinaire free-trader, but a free-trader nonetheless.
    — Timothy Noah, The New Republic, 10 July 2020
  • Her philosophy is less doctrinaire and more emotionally nuanced.
    — Marisa Meltzer, WSJ, 15 June 2021
  • Restoring competition to the tech marketplace should appeal to all but the most doctrinaire libertarians and of course the oligarchs themselves.
    — Andrew Stuttaford, National Review, 3 Oct. 2021
  • Zionism, at least at its most doctrinaire, insists a Jew can achieve total realization as a Jew only by living in Israel.
    — Marc Tracy, New York Times, 14 Jan. 2024
  • Unlike more doctrinaire filmmakers of the time, such as Stanley Kramer, Stevens never permits his film’s message to overtake its artistry.
    — Peter Tonguette, WSJ, 29 July 2022
  • Today’s left, with a few notable exceptions, appeals to a highly moralistic conception of social justice and doctrinaire equality.
    — Daniel J. Mahoney, National Review, 23 Sep. 2020
  • French female filmmakers differ from their American counterparts, seeming less defensive, less doctrinaire, and not at all misandrist.
    — Armond White, National Review, 27 Aug. 2021
  • But the fanciful and the doctrinaire coexisted on the walls of Tehran—until Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf became mayor.
    — Amir Ahmadi Arian, The New York Review of Books, 30 Sep. 2020
  • If personnel is policy, as the saying in Washington goes, the most doctrinaire progressives in the Democratic Party have to be getting a little concerned.
    — W. James Antle Iii, Washington Examiner, 3 Dec. 2020
  • This is the crucial point, underscoring the scholarly refutation of the doctrinaire nonsense about the supposedly pro-slavery Revolution.
    — Sean Wilentz, The New York Review of Books, 13 Jan. 2022
  • Vance represents a more doctrinaire America Firstism, which in some ways is traditional Republican politics on steroids and in other ways departs from those traditions.
    — The New Yorker, 3 May 2022
  • This leads me to believe that Barrett would follow her legal conscience instead of allowing political considerations or a doctrinaire adherence to stare decisis to guide her decision-making process.
    — Isaac Schorr, National Review, 6 Oct. 2020
  • After the war’s end, Bouteflika became foreign minister at just 25, at a time when Algeria was a model of doctrinaire socialism tethered to the Soviet Union.
    — NBC News, 18 Sep. 2021
  • Meanwhile, doctrinaire Salafis of the tendency promoted by Hifter—who preach absolute loyalty to a sitting ruler—would further extend their influence, and enforce their harsh interpretation of Sharia law more widely.
    — Frederic Wehrey, Foreign Affairs, 22 Feb. 2017
  • The pope's rollback immediately created an uproar among traditionalists already opposed to Francis' more progressive bent and still nostalgic for Benedict's doctrinaire papacy.
    — Nicole Winfield, Star Tribune, 16 July 2021
  • The pope's rollback immediately created an uproar among traditionalists already opposed to Francis’ more progressive bent and nostalgic for Benedict’s doctrinaire papacy.
    — Fox News, 16 July 2021
  • But while the doctrinaire emphasis on originality began to soften in the late Seventies, Rosner’s experience with the academic music world had taken a toll on his aspirations as well as on his personality, which already tended toward orneriness.
    — Walter Simmons, Harper's Magazine, 25 May 2021
  • The increasing collaboration between archaeologists and ecologists is revealing an ancient world that discomfits doctrinaire environmentalists.
    — Keith Kloor, Discover Magazine, 19 Apr. 2010

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