How to Use allusive in a Sentence

allusive

adjective
Definition of allusivenext
Synonyms for allusivenext
  • While the new film has Zeena making advances on Stan, the 1947 adaptation had to be more allusive.
    — Ben Kenigsberg, New York Times, 19 Dec. 2021
  • Yet its true reward is the pleasure of discovery—that of unearthing the treasure that is her art’s allusive brilliance.
    — Lance Esplund, WSJ, 25 Dec. 2021
  • In sharply detailed yet allusive abstractions, Hall turns the Harlem of the nineteen-twenties into a stage of grand philosophical tragedy.
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 9 Nov. 2021
  • Nottage has cut perhaps half of her play to make room for Gordon’s music, and in doing so has made the smart if painful choice to retain only what is most narrowly tailored to the plot and yet most allusive.
    — Jesse Green, New York Times, 31 Jan. 2022
  • Most allusive is the album’s cover, which depicts a crude, disquieting patchwork of clip-art rainbows, black mushrooms and a coffin.
    — Nathan Rizzo | For The Oregonian/oregonlive, oregonlive, 29 July 2021
  • Readers aren’t taxed to unpack imagery or allusive language.
    — Maureen Corrigan, Washington Post, 6 July 2020
  • The kind of thinking Lamb struggled to do alone was the thinking that spun together the threads of his essays and letters: conversational, allusive, associative.
    — Clare Bucknell, The New York Review of Books, 3 Aug. 2022
  • All of his best work is allusive, steeped in research and context, materially creative, humane.
    — Michael Kimmelman, New York Times, 15 Feb. 2023
  • The novelist's allusive account contrasts her lonely rowboat ride with the sumptuous Nile journeys made by Flaubert and Florence Nightingale.
    — Cnt Editors, Condé Nast Traveler, 16 June 2022
  • The Hemingway style -- clipped, allusive, laconic and hard-boiled -- helped give American writing its rhythm and tone as much as blues and jazz helped give American music its global identity.
    — Gene Seymour, CNN, 13 Apr. 2021
  • Roger Zelazny burst onto the science fiction scene in the 1960s with a series of ground-breaking stories that combined a pulp sensibility with allusive, pyrotechnic prose.
    — Geek's Guide To The Galaxy, WIRED, 21 May 2021
  • We are led from the early Flag, Target, Number and Letter paintings, with their banal images and lush surfaces, to the weirdly allusive but fairly impenetrable recent works.
    — Karen Wilkin, WSJ, 14 Dec. 2021
  • Every moment had its music, and many of those moments were as much allusive as illustrative, with old pop songs momentarily summoned to accent the action.
    — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 21 Dec. 2020
  • Yet there’s an underlying emotional pathology that, in the allusive and time-fractured action, appears at the root of the catastrophe—an affective breakdown with comfort and luxury at the root.
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 7 Aug. 2020
  • Before long, in his typically allusive and impish style, Hoare has unfurled a whole tapestry of lives connected, however loosely, to Dürer’s work and its themes.
    — Washington Post, 30 Apr. 2021
  • The Second Violin Concerto is in four movements, each with an allusive title, another evocative common trait in Williams’ concert pieces.
    — Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times, 28 Sep. 2022
  • This process involves unmarked quotation and complex, allusive use of rhyme, meter, and linguistic register, all of which make her poetry extremely hard to translate.
    — Sophie Pinkham, Harper's Magazine, 25 May 2021
  • Most of these tactics rely on flattery to one degree or another: the notice that someone has liked your photo or mentioned your name or added you to their network—promises that are always allusive and tantalizingly incomplete.
    — Meghan O'Gieblyn, Wired, 12 Aug. 2021
  • The Book of the New Sun is a dense, allusive work that initially presents itself as sword and sorcery, gradually reveals itself as planetary romance, then becomes increasingly concerned with theology and metaphysics.
    — Geek's Guide To The Galaxy, WIRED, 27 Jan. 2023
  • But the dramatic scenarios, intended to be surreal, were instead generic, built out of familiar ideas from horror films, skillfully recycled and reproduced but not allusive in any illuminating way.
    — Brian Seibert, New York Times, 27 Sep. 2020
  • This dense and tightly plotted novel — the Nobel laureate’s first in almost 50 years — is also allusive, fantastically ambitious, and populated with a cast of outrageous characters who are attempting to thrive in an outrageous country.
    — Tiana Reid, Vulture, 31 Aug. 2021
  • The term is appropriately open-ended, since the participants devise pieces that are minimalist and mysteriously allusive.
    — Washington Post, 10 Sep. 2021
  • Human cruelty toward these animals forms a strong undercurrent in this richly allusive but sometimes frustratingly oblique account.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 26 Sep. 2021
  • Gathering forty or fifty images—portraits, landscapes, still-lifes, interior views—in a loose, allusive sequence has become the default position of most contemporary storytelling photographers.
    — Vince Aletti, The New Yorker, 1 Feb. 2022

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