How to Use premodern in a Sentence

premodern

adjective
Definition of premodernnext
  • Sea travel was the fastest, safest, and cheapest way to move people and goods in the premodern world, costing about a fifth of the price of equivalent land transport.
    — William Dalrymple, The New York Review of Books, 1 Dec. 2022
  • Today, just as in premodern Christmases, overturning norms during this special time helps to strengthen those same norms for the rest of the year.
    — Maria Sachiko Cecire, Smithsonian Magazine, 23 Dec. 2020
  • Americans especially came to think of such events as things of the past—relics from the time of tenement living and premodern medicine.
    — Larry Brilliant, Foreign Affairs, 20 Dec. 2022
  • In a world with less pollution, plants and trees will become more dominant drivers of cloud formation, an echo of the premodern world.
    — WIRED, 29 Sep. 2023
  • For champions of progress, who often cite painless dentistry as the summum bonum, the surgery of the premodern period is nothing but a vile species of Grand Guignol.
    — Will Self, Harper’s Magazine , 28 Sep. 2022
  • The softer premodern methods of soaking up floods, like oyster beds and wetlands, would never be able to absorb a major surge in the compact space left available in today’s New York.
    — Christopher Bonanos, Curbed, 30 Oct. 2023
  • The bushi were a 20th century invention — a way to turn premodern warriors into role models for a new national culture.
    — Reid McCarter, Washington Post, 14 Aug. 2020
  • And if most premodern empires are unthinkable without cavalry, climate could help in more direct ways, too.
    — Ben Ehrenreich, The New Republic, 10 May 2023
  • In the premodern world, there were also several jobs that modern women have since jettisoned thanks to modern conveniences.
    — Time, 20 Jan. 2023
  • This was where Sebald grew up: an almost premodern idyll of breathtaking beauty, the atmosphere of which was nevertheless laden with trauma and terror.
    — Ryu Spaeth, The New Republic, 19 Aug. 2021
  • One of the central propositions advanced by the late Qing thinkers was that China needed not merely to find a way out of the crisis facing China at that time but also to embed the solution in premodern Chinese cultural forms.
    — Rana Mitter, Foreign Affairs, 20 Feb. 2024
  • In recent years, LiDAR scans have helped improve researchers’ understanding of people’s lives in premodern cities and settlements.
    — Livia Gershon, Smithsonian Magazine, 12 May 2021
  • Over time, hostility to modern ideas became the default position of an institution that cleaved to an image of itself as premodern and unchanging.
    — Paul Elie, The Atlantic, 11 Dec. 2022
  • Of the hundreds of masks produced during the Muromachi period, about 40 to 50 form the archetypes for the masks made today, says the historian Eric Rath, who specializes in premodern Japan; many represent different characters, depending on the play.
    — Hannah Kirshner Bon Duke, New York Times, 16 Mar. 2023
  • The burial site, and particularly the crown and other fineries interred with the woman, hinted at a premodern European culture in which women might have held considerable power.
    — New York Times, 17 Nov. 2021
  • The show was slammed by medical experts, as a premodern birth process is associated with vastly higher infant mortality rates.
    — Ew Staff Updated, EW.com, 29 Nov. 2023
  • Among the achievements of premodern rainforest residents is the creation of enriched soil, or terra preta, which enabled communities to produce food in a landscape that would have otherwise been inhospitable.
    — Livia Gershon, Smithsonian Magazine, 15 Dec. 2020
  • The thing about Marcus’s brand of Stoicism that struck me during my first reading was its conspicuously premodern impracticality.
    — Tom Bissell, Harper’s Magazine , 10 Apr. 2023
  • Perhaps, Graeber and Wengrow suggest, that is the problem: Our unshakable conviction that modernity spells progress and liberation prevents us from seeing that, in many times and places, premodern life was actually more rational and free.
    — George Scialabba, The New Republic, 1 Nov. 2021
  • Modern Witch Hunts Like those in premodern Europe, many contemporary witch hunts can be traced to expansions or intensifications of capitalism.
    — Silvia Federici, Scientific American, 17 Apr. 2023
  • Great Leap Forward was the most damaging, destroyed the institutional, cultural, and other buffers that in premodern times helped China’s environment and Chinese society recover from disruptions.
    — Stevan Harrell, Foreign Affairs, 12 Dec. 2023
  • Personal diplomacy was most influential in premodern times, when monarchs strengthened political alliances through marriages.
    — Mike Watson, WSJ, 17 June 2021
  • As an alternative, MacIntyre encouraged a rediscovery of premodern conceptions of exemplary character.
    — Samuel Goldman, The Week, 27 Oct. 2021
  • The authenticity ideal is artisanal craft, romantically conjuring premodern labor untainted by massive machinery.
    — Michael Serazio, Fortune, 25 Dec. 2023

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