as in temporal
having to do with life on earth especially as opposed to that in heaven
a sermon against our obsession with earthly pursuits
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Example Sentences
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Recent Examples of earthly
Other earthly assets are protected in other ways.
—
Jeffrey Kluger, Time, 20 Jan. 2026
Though good art work is spiritual maintenance, Molly Odintz reminds us this week to maintain our earthly vessels.
—Literary Hub, 16 Jan. 2026
Chris Leduc / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images The next few hundred words will do me, and my profession, no earthly good.
—David Aldridge, New York Times, 14 Jan. 2026
Sátántangó’s desolate landscapes, dominated by mud, wind, and overcast skies, summoned a vision of earthly purgatory unrivaled in almost all of cinema.
—Tim Grierson, Rolling Stone, 6 Jan. 2026
See All Example Sentences for earthly
Jeffrey Kluger, Time, 20 Jan. 2026
Though good art work is spiritual maintenance, Molly Odintz reminds us this week to maintain our earthly vessels.
—Literary Hub, 16 Jan. 2026
Chris Leduc / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images The next few hundred words will do me, and my profession, no earthly good.
—David Aldridge, New York Times, 14 Jan. 2026
Sátántangó’s desolate landscapes, dominated by mud, wind, and overcast skies, summoned a vision of earthly purgatory unrivaled in almost all of cinema.
—Tim Grierson, Rolling Stone, 6 Jan. 2026
See All Example Sentences for earthly
Recent Examples of Synonyms for earthly
Adjective
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What looked like ideological bias was, more often, temporal lag.—
Charles Edward Gehrke,
Fortune,
9 Feb. 2026
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Again and again, Tennyson fills his beautifully wrought poems with enormous, unfathomable depths—sometimes cosmic, sometimes temporal, sometimes psychological, often oceanic.—
Kathryn Schulz,
New Yorker,
9 Feb. 2026
Adjective
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To an outsider, this looks like a mundane infrastructure dispute.—
Yunus Emre Tozal,
Chicago Tribune,
9 Feb. 2026
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But most of the messages were more mundane, such as highlighting support for requiring voters to provide identification at the polls.—
Bart Jansen,
USA Today,
6 Feb. 2026
Adjective
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But fertilizing terrestrial crops with marine material may muddle that work.—
Meghan Bartels,
Scientific American,
11 Feb. 2026
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Traditionally, cars only connect to terrestrial cell towers.—
Noelle Harff,
San Diego Union-Tribune,
10 Feb. 2026
Adjective
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Both Bloom’s and Brick’s physical devices may also give them an edge with young people who increasingly prefer the analog over the digital.—
Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez,
Fortune,
13 Feb. 2026
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There are more overtly sexy moments in Fennell’s movie — the physical intimacy is ratcheted up significantly from the book — but this scene underlines the Brontë’s themes of desire and repression — and the friction between them — that imprinted on the filmmaker as a teen.—
Angelique Jackson,
Variety,
13 Feb. 2026
Adjective
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Not quite plant, not quite animal; delicious and wild and rare.—
Callie Sumlin,
Bon Appetit Magazine,
15 Oct. 2025
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, dogs were more likely to respond to animal stimuli than to non-animal stimuli.—
Margherita Bassi,
Smithsonian Magazine,
21 July 2025
Cite this Entry
“Earthly.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/earthly. Accessed 16 Feb. 2026.
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