How to Use selfhood in a Sentence

selfhood

noun
  • Not least, the idea of the soul is bound up with our search for identity or selfhood.
    — TheWeek, 28 Mar. 2020
  • Hence the tradition of grit as glue in rap songs — this urge to state, with style and coarse grace, your selfhood to the world.
    — New York Times, 14 Mar. 2022
  • Diana’s fragile selfhood, and the happiness of her two sons, is at stake.
    — Peter Rainer, The Christian Science Monitor, 24 Mar. 2022
  • There had never been enough of them to allow this luxury of blatant selfhood.
    — Andrew Solomon, New York Times, 27 June 2019
  • Can culture and selfhood reshape themselves in the absence of all this beauty?
    — Megan Mayhew-Bergman, Scientific American, 19 Mar. 2024
  • Mark’s dilemma frames a superlative new season that probes the nature of selfhood, death, and most of all love.
    — Judy Berman, TIME, 17 Jan. 2025
  • My selfhood was partly shaped by being engaged and challenged with everything all the time, all at once.
    — Literary Hub, 4 Nov. 2025
  • But treat your hair with love, and develop and blossom in your own sense of selfhood; that's the most important journey.
    — Chelsea Hall, Marie Claire, 28 Oct. 2020
  • The anthemic, but calm, song details feelings of loss of selfhood and security.
    — Izzy Colón, SPIN, 8 Feb. 2022
  • She is perched on the livewire between the raw and the cooked, ready to delve into love, selfhood, and loneliness with timing and turns that keep you on board.
    — Literary Hub, 2 Jan. 2026
  • South Asian, so neither of us can offer a firsthand model of Black selfhood to our children.
    — Rumaan Alam, The New Yorker, 9 Aug. 2021
  • In most novels domestics serve only to open and close doors, make meals or assist with the toilette of those who have attained true selfhood.
    — Chandrahas Choudhury, WSJ, 12 May 2017
  • Both require uncomfortable walks through selfhood, life and choices.
    — Washington Post, 20 Jan. 2022
  • Our true nature, or selfhood, is created by Spirit and is wholly loved, complete, and sound.
    — Alistair Budd, Christian Science Monitor, 24 June 2026
  • Still, questions of selfhood extend beyond Kim and her storylines.
    — Vogue, 12 May 2022
  • These duplicities have come to light in the last few years, complicating searches and feelings of selfhood.
    — Seyward Darby, Longreads, 8 Sep. 2022
  • In Search of Lost Time can explore selfhood, then, and find that the self is a sprawling, mutable thing.
    — Literary Hub, 18 Feb. 2026
  • Within the mud, squalor and sickness of the contraband camps, so too came the casting away of the former body and an emergence of a fuller kind of selfhood.
    — Literary Hub, 17 Oct. 2025
  • Her characters longedto escape the drudgery of selfhood and convention.
    — New York Times, 19 Apr. 2021
  • Rooting out the cause took years of detective work—and forced his family to confront the trickiest questions of selfhood.
    — Krista Stevens, Longreads, 10 Aug. 2020
  • Rife with self-mockery, his work dares to register the brilliant, kaleidoscopic puzzle of selfhood.
    — Sebastian Smee, Washington Post, 1 Mar. 2024
  • In her second novel, the author uses a familiar genre to explore startling visions of selfhood.
    — Sarah Resnick, The New Yorker, 15 June 2020
  • The statement of names is also a reaffirmation of selfhood – that women can and should have the right to be individuals.
    — refinery29.com, 13 June 2018
  • In came exultations of subjectivity and selfhood—the stuff of life that cannot be boiled down to facts and scientific data.
    — Alex Greenberger, ARTnews.com, 5 Feb. 2025
  • Still others dove into the film as an existential treatise on selfhood and over-reliance on technology.
    — Nick Romano, EW.com, 2 Dec. 2021
  • Like her father and grandfather, Marlow will surely compose her own narrative of selfhood.
    — Emily Bernard, Harper's magazine, 25 Nov. 2019
  • The movie backs gracefully into notions of identity and selfhood by playing them for ingenious slapstick.
    — Ty Burr, BostonGlobe.com, 19 June 2019
  • For Buddhists, the clear light of reality is visible only to those who abandon the illusion of selfhood.
    — Hari Kunzru, Harper’s Magazine , 22 June 2022
  • Our true, spiritual selfhood cannot deviate from perfection.
    — Thomas Mitchinson, Christian Science Monitor, 30 Sep. 2025
  • Drndić suggests that the desire for autonomous selfhood can only be driven underground—scattered and buried, but never erased.
    — Merve Emre, The New York Review of Books, 6 June 2019

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