How to Use carnivalesque in a Sentence

carnivalesque

adjective
Definition of carnivalesquenext
Synonyms for carnivalesquenext
  • Most of the time, there was a warm, carnivalesque atmosphere, but a crowd’s mood can also change at the speed of light.
    — Laura Cappelle, New York Times, 9 Mar. 2023
  • Their world seems like our own but then, when a dormouse is offered as a snack, becomes almost carnivalesque.
    — James Romm, WSJ, 12 Mar. 2021
  • His delight in all things carnal and carnivalesque flows as freely as ever.
    — Justin Chang, chicagotribune.com, 27 July 2017
  • In the moments after a president gives the State of the Union, Statuary Hall becomes a carnivalesque madhouse.
    — Nash Jenkins, Time, 31 Jan. 2018
  • During the town’s carnivalesque Battle of the Flowers, Her Majesty much enjoyed pelting the masquerading crowd from the balcony of her hotel.
    — Jonathan Miles, Town & Country, 5 Sep. 2023
  • Trump's Senate impeachment trial will live up to the carnivalesque expectations that some of us had for it.
    — Matthew Walther, TheWeek, 17 Jan. 2020
  • But fans from the other 28 countries, such as Axel, have stayed on long after their team’s defeat, to soak up the carnivalesque atmosphere and maximize time with newfound loves.
    — Amie Ferris-Rotman, Washington Post, 9 July 2018
  • Oh, and who can forget the balloons, birthday cake, a bounce house, live music, Folklorico Dancers and story time at this carnivalesque gathering fit for an entire state.
    — The Denver Channel, The Know, 1 Aug. 2019
  • Along with New York-style slices, the pizzeria will boast a menu of 10 eye-popping pies and six hoagies, served alongside Brgr Stop’s usual menu of carnivalesque hamburgers, boozy milkshakes and root-beer-sriracha chicken wings.
    — Phillip Valys, sun-sentinel.com, 5 Aug. 2020
  • Ally’s sightings of gruesome clowns around town—a reference to the rash of creepy carnivalesque encounters around North America last year—provides one of the big political metaphors of the show.
    — Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic, 6 Sep. 2017
  • These early novels could be carnivalesque in their humor.
    — Dwight Garner, New York Times, 13 June 2023
  • Capping weeks of nationwide strikes, protests and carnivalesque street parties, parliament voted 59 to 42 in favor of Pashinyan.
    — Washington Post, 12 May 2018
  • Children, groups of friends, couples, and elderly people perch on the moon’s hook, beaming into the camera, acting out a carnivalesque prefiguration of the events of 1969.
    — Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic, 10 July 2019
  • Capping weeks of nationwide strikes, protests, and carnivalesque street parties, Parliament voted 59 to 42 in favor of Pashinyan.
    — Washington Post, BostonGlobe.com, 8 May 2018
  • Surely even medieval peasants sometimes stared into the middle distance and sighed over their barley pottage, longing for the next village fête day and a bit of carnivalesque mayhem.
    — Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, 20 Aug. 2020
  • Mr Trump’s carnivalesque approach to the presidency has made life hard for America’s allies, but his first year in office has not brought forth anything like the full horrors that some predicted.
    — The Economist, 25 Jan. 2018
  • Piccioli used watercolors to paint, in his signature pink, a carnivalesque mask over Dalí’s face.
    — Scott Roxborough, The Hollywood Reporter, 4 Sep. 2023
  • Another image, taken during the Hudson Valley wave of the mid-eighties, reportedly by a state trooper, shows an arc of lights in a carnivalesque array of colors, hanging in the night sky.
    — Chris Wiley, The New Yorker, 3 Aug. 2023
  • Cairo is a place of carnivalesque crowds but also the utter stasis of cafés, where the unemployed and redundant intellectuals loiter.
    — Ange Mlinko, The New York Review of Books, 1 Dec. 2022
  • Presented using carnivalesque imagery, its middle panel is a self-portrait that conveys the artist’s guilt about teaching within a system that buries students in debt.
    — Troy Reimink, Detroit Free Press, 17 Sep. 2017
  • The result is part carnivalesque caricature and part generic smiley face.
    — Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times, 6 June 2023
  • The band, which is made of immigrants from Colombia, fuses cumbia, psychedelic rock, afrobeat, dub, parade music, hip-hop, soul and more, making energetic dance music that is steeped in a carnivalesque activist spirit.
    — John Adamian, courant.com, 14 June 2019
  • With his bullying serve, haymaker forehand and knack for carnivalesque shots, Kyrgios is wildly entertaining to watch.
    — Michael Steinberger, New York Times, 25 Aug. 2016
  • His reporting causes thousands of people to gather at the mountain Minosa is buried under, creating a carnivalesque atmosphere.
    — Steve Larkin, The Week, 1 Apr. 2022
  • The result is a group of carnivalesque monsters clustered, bizarre and monumental, in an otherwise typically Tuscan landscape.
    — Lauren Elkin, Travel + Leisure, 21 Mar. 2023
  • Eisenman has lately funneled much of her perversity into raucous sculptures that answer exactly to the tenor of our ghoulish, carnivalesque politics.
    — Sebastian Smee, Washington Post, 19 Aug. 2020
  • Just as societies need carnivalesque holidays like Mardi Gras to remain healthy, so music requires regular infusions of Dionysian eroticism and violence.
    — Michael Dirda, Washington Post, 16 Oct. 2019
  • The most interesting Japanese photographers, though, were anxious and angry; their moments were mostly indecisive, and their carnivalesque characters, A-bomb victims, gutter trash, and shocks of light seemed outlandish if not perverse.
    — Leo Rubinfien, The New York Review of Books, 11 Feb. 2021
  • There had been a few days of expert testimony, about the conservation of linear momentum and retrograde extrapolation of blood alcohol content, which had dampened the overall carnivalesque mood.
    — Kevin Conley, Town & Country, 24 Dec. 2012
  • The songs had common ingredients—two highly distinctive singers, textural guitar influenced by folk and jazz and flamenco, carnivalesque keyboard and classical woodwinds—but no common formula.
    — Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic, 20 Aug. 2017

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