How to Use shell shock in a Sentence

shell shock

noun
  • Over that year, Dončić has shaken off the shell shock.
    — Dan Woike, New York Times, 2 Feb. 2026
  • As a result, the shell shock of the past 24 months for consumers is still wearing off.
    — Rob Wile, NBC News, 11 Jan. 2024
  • Consumers have been through a lot in a short amount of time, to say the least, and a degree of shell shock cannot be ruled out.
    — Michele Markham, Forbes, 15 Aug. 2022
  • There is a sense of shell shock, likely some residual effects of PTSD.
    — John P. Darcy, Vogue, 27 Dec. 2018
  • Medical workers also face their own version of shell shock from the psychological strain of seeing so many patients die.
    — Stephen Collinson, CNN, 24 Mar. 2020
  • Dirk Bogarde plays the officer assigned to defend the young man, who obviously is suffering from shell shock.
    — Susan King, Los Angeles Times, 1 Jan. 2020
  • Over the spring and summer, restaurants that survived the initial shell shock of Covid-19 pivoted to takeout and outdoor dining.
    — NBC News, 29 Nov. 2020
  • Seemingly overnight, the field of war psychiatry emerged and a new term—shell shock—appeared to describe a range of mental injuries, from facial tics to an inability to speak.
    — Erin Blakemore, National Geographic, 16 June 2020
  • Polchin wonders if the men, many of whom were veterans of the First World War, were in shell shock—though an exact diagnosis now hardly matters.
    — Caleb Crain, The New Yorker, 20 June 2019
  • From then on, Candy’s calculating mind, despite the shell shock, goes into overdrive, concocting the alibi.
    — Tommy Cummings, Dallas News, 9 May 2023
  • Background characters have gruesome war wounds or shell shock, and postwar Liverpool has been bombed back to Victorian levels of deprivation.
    — Christopher Tayler, Harpers Magazine, 27 Jan. 2026
  • What shell shock was to the soldiers returning from World War I, unemployment and economic insecurity were to the middle and working classes.
    — Susanna Lee, The Conversation, 1 Apr. 2020
  • Iya, the gentle giant nicknamed Beanpole (first-timer Viktoria Miroshnichenko), was discharged for shell shock and suffers strange paralytic blackouts as a result of the trauma.
    — Scott Roxborough, The Hollywood Reporter, 8 Nov. 2019
  • With these weapons came an ever-expanding vocabulary to depict their hellish consequences, from shell shock to radiation poisoning to Agent Orange Syndrome.
    — David Oshinsky, The New York Review of Books, 13 Feb. 2020
  • As documented by the humanitarian NGO Proliska, which is monitoring the conflict zone, one of the shells struck a kindergarten, leaving two employees with shell shock—but not injuring any of the children that were there.
    — David Meyer, Fortune, 17 Feb. 2022
  • Long before the official recognition of PTSD in 1980, veterans quietly suffered with uncompensated disabilities related to combat stress known as shell shock for much of their post-military lives.
    — Jason A. Higgins, The Conversation, 17 Aug. 2022

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