How to Use patrician in a Sentence

patrician

1 of 2 noun
  • For the dearth, / The gods, not the patricians, make it, and / Your knees to them, not arms, must help.
    — James Shapiro, The New Yorker, 8 Apr. 2020
  • Bobby, as he was known, was born into a life of patrician privilege.
    — Teddy Wayne, New York Times, 6 Apr. 2024
  • Venice was particularly notable for the fact that its noble class, the patricians, walked around the city.
    — Livia Gershon, JSTOR Daily, 30 Dec. 2024
  • As is the case with the aesthetics of people, exquisite lines can be found on patrician and proletariat cars alike.
    — Robert Ross, Robb Report, 21 Feb. 2025
  • Gaddis is not afraid of braiding in highfalutin references, and his humor is both very patrician and cultured as well as loose and street.
    — The New Yorker, New Yorker, 16 July 2025
  • Plebeians and patricians, their tribunes and senators, are checks and balances on one another.
    — Ryan Shinkel, WSJ, 21 July 2017
  • That is because the Roman Forum began as a market and became the place where patricians would meet plebeians and press the flesh.
    — Ron Grossman, chicagotribune.com, 26 Mar. 2018
  • In the days of the Roman Empire, plebeians and patricians alike entertained themselves by watching men fight to the death.
    — James Grebey, Vulture, 22 Nov. 2024
  • Katharine Graham, quiet, wry, and patrician, was then one of the most powerful women in America.
    — Clare Malone, New Yorker, 12 May 2025
  • Bateman also suggested that orchids were nature’s green patricians.
    — Katy Kelleher, Longreads, 9 Oct. 2019
  • Lunsford was a smart and curious scholarship student, far from the patricians who dominated his Harvard class.
    — Dallas News, 3 July 2019
  • People around town have never much cared for caricatures of the place—the starchy patricians, the chinless wonders, the history of exclusion—even when there is truth in them.
    — Evan Osnos, The New Yorker, 3 May 2020
  • Born into wealth and an ancestral line that stretched to the nation's founding, Rush, with piercing blue eyes, thick silver hair and a square jaw, carried an air of the patrician set.
    — Eileen Finan, People.com, 10 June 2025
  • Over the show’s first four seasons, the onetime patrician, played by Catherine O’Hara, lost her friends, her acting prestige, and a handful of her beloved wigs.
    — Hannah Giorgis, The Atlantic, 21 Sep. 2019
  • The plot centers on the doomed love between a young Christian woman and a Roman patrician, but their pallid romance is not what turned the novel into a worldwide sensation.
    — Gaia Squarci, Smithsonian Magazine, 18 Sep. 2020
  • Once upon a time, a doddering old man spoke of a dream about a united city in this empire’s capital, where every man, woman, and child could walk its streets and live a good life regardless of their patrician or plebeian birthright.
    — David Fear, Rolling Stone, 22 Nov. 2024
  • In practice, the plebeians (the general citizenry) had fewer voting rights than the aristocratic patricians.
    — National Geographic, 4 Nov. 2019
  • Only Goode seems to be having any fun, strutting around as Hollywood royalty while wrapping everything in Evans’ patrician-with-a-head-cold voice.
    — David Fear, Rolling Stone, 28 Apr. 2022
  • Raised in Connecticut and rooted in Texas, the patrician Bush came across as a hapless tourist squinting to understand the dialect and comprehend the natives.
    — Mark Z. Barabak, Los Angeles Times, 4 June 2023
  • The suggestion that the first President Bush was some elitist patrician who didn’t know his way around a modern grocery store continues to rankle Barr three decades later.
    — New York Times, 27 Feb. 2022
  • Johnson, elevated to office by chaos forces—insanity and murder—seeks to finally be accepted not as the understudy but as the ramrod patrician who can set the nation righter than before.
    — Doreen St. Félix, New Yorker, 14 June 2025
  • One of leather’s most revelatory qualities is its ability to shape-shift, to convey bodily, musky sensuality one moment and an almost patrician reserve the next.
    — Town & Country, 3 Mar. 2023
  • Quite how Cameron and his patrician air and association with mistakes of the past fit into Sunak’s political program, ahead of a general election next year, is anybody’s guess.
    — Sam Knight, The New Yorker, 15 Nov. 2023
  • Published in German during the 15th century, it was then said to describe the pilgrimage of Gabriel Muffel, son of a Nuremburg patrician.
    — Theresa MacHemer, Smithsonian Magazine, 10 Jan. 2020
  • Cyrus Vance, Carter’s patrician secretary of state, called for a coalition government between the shah and his opponents, which Khomeini curtly rejected.
    — Ray Takeyh, Foreign Affairs, 26 Feb. 2021
  • There are dashes of class criticism mixed into the proceedings, largely with the Ravenscroft family, though nothing beyond light reference to Robert’s patrician background.
    — Nicholas Quah, Vulture, 11 Oct. 2024
  • Born the son of a patrician in the early 15th century, in Mainz, Germany, Gutenberg was originally trained as a goldsmith and metallurgist.
    — Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times, 17 Jan. 2024
  • Today, a century after the progressive movement that inspired Kane and real-world patricians, class and inequality are once again at the center of American politics.
    — Osita Nwanevu, The New Yorker, 14 July 2019
  • The show follows Wiig’s wannabe patrician Maxine Dellacorte-Simmons, who is hell-bent on becoming the belle of 1960’s Palm Beach by elbowing her way into the upper echelons of Florida’s most exclusive beach club, the Palm Royale.
    — Jack Dunn, Variety, 3 Mar. 2026

patrician

2 of 2 adjective
  • Bailes is tall and handsome in a patrician, head-on-a-coin kind of way.
    — Joel Lovell, Condé Nast Traveler, 28 Mar. 2017
  • The game has a certain mystique, with its patrician dress code and complicated rules.
    — Tara Bahrampour, Washington Post, 10 May 2023
  • Whether the expression had taken root in some patrician quarters by the time Momand penned his satire is moot.
    — The Editors, Robb Report, 28 Mar. 2024
  • Allow me one last gasp of my assimilation into patrician ways of old.
    — Anna Deavere Smith, The Atlantic, 13 Nov. 2023
  • Brutus, like most Romans, came from a plebeian, not a patrician family.
    — Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi, Discover Magazine, 9 Sep. 2022
  • The domus, or house, was clearly the residence of an important patrician family.
    — Jane Recker, Smithsonian Magazine, 1 Apr. 2022
  • Janu, a patrician gentleman who was a landlord to many in the neighborhood, had recently had a stroke and was partially paralyzed.
    — Anant Gupta, Washington Post, 22 Sep. 2023
  • For some, Waugh’s bittersweet elegy became a sort of handbook of patrician showmanship.
    — The Economist, 11 June 2020
  • In private practice, former New Dealers had dislodged the profession’s patrician old guard.
    — Ian MacDougall, Harper’s Magazine , 28 Sep. 2022
  • From youth, his works were expertly wrought, sumptuously opulent but clearly of their time, and full of passion restrained somewhat by a tidy, patrician melancholy.
    — Tim Page, WSJ, 24 Mar. 2023
  • As the band’s patrician, party-animal bassist, however, Roberts is quite lively, though her subplot takes a backseat to the film’s other story lines.
    — Bilge Ebiri, Vulture, 10 Oct. 2025
  • The irony of ironies is that Will Knowland represents the best chance that Eton actually has of shedding its image of patrician disdain.
    — Cameron Hilditch, National Review, 4 Dec. 2020
  • For patrician statesmen, grandeur is usually understated, radiating restraint rather than gawk-inspiring shows of brazen wealth.
    — Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Fortune, 13 Apr. 2026
  • These unlikely subjects for unlikely patrons seem completely at odds with Manet’s gifts as a detached, and at times aloof, observer of patrician urban culture.
    — Colin B. Bailey, The New York Review of Books, 17 Nov. 2020
  • Ellie’s wealthy patrician parents invite her and Sebastian to spend July 4th weekend with them at their palatial summer estate.
    — Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter, 25 May 2023
  • His election strategy in 1931 contrasted his patrician roots with Cermak’s plebian origins.
    — Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune, 5 Mar. 2023
  • Such positions, along with the pope’s easygoing manner, earned him a form of pop-cultural celebrity never sought or won by his immediate predecessor, the dour and patrician Benedict.
    — Maria Clara Bingemer, Foreign Affairs, 14 June 2018
  • Defenders said her critics were confusing her patrician gentility for senility.
    — Robert D. McFadden, New York Times, 29 Sep. 2023
  • Harden heightens the patrician obliviousness of Joan, who prides herself on being put together even while reeling after her husband (Mark Moses) suddenly left her.
    — Caroline Framke, Variety, 26 Sep. 2022
  • Editorials dissected how to achieve the brand’s traditional, patrician look, while TikTok and Instagram filled with home décor hauls inspired by the label’s timeless Americana.
    — Angela Velasquez, Sourcing Journal, 9 Feb. 2026
  • Raised in the patrician circles of New York, Sister Parish opened her firm, in 1933 after her family’s fortunes declined following the 1929 market crash.
    — Sofia Celeste, Footwear News, 22 May 2026
  • As an industrious and self-reliant senior, Ringwald essentially baby-sits her chronically myopic father (Harry Dean Stanton), sews her own clothes and contends with the condescension of her patrician peers.
    — Duane Byrge, HollywoodReporter, 31 Mar. 2026

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