How to Use changeling in a Sentence

changeling

noun
  • Thirteen years later, the goblin world is in crisis and needs the changeling back.
    oregonlive, 20 Oct. 2019
  • But as is so often the case, take a ho-hum little thing and put it in a garden and the ugly duckling does its changeling thing.
    Paul Cappiello, The Courier-Journal, 18 Aug. 2017
  • Nóra comes to believe that the child left in her care is not her grandson, but a changeling left behind by the fairies, or Good People, who cause illness and misfortune.
    Patty Rhule, USA TODAY, 19 Sep. 2017
  • The young Joan—with her gift for painting, her passion for dancing, her bristling impatience with school rules, and her wanderlust—was more like a changeling.
    Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, 29 Nov. 2020
  • There are also more troubling tales, one of which is recorded by the Grimms, of elves stealing healthy human babies and leaving deformed or disabled changelings in their place.
    Jennifer Latson, Time, 20 June 2017
  • But some sympathetic twitchy polymath would come along and explain that abductions happen all the time; this is what changelings always were.
    Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review, 21 Dec. 2017
  • The British actress Andrea Riseborough is one of those metamorphic changelings so different from film to film, role to role, that few people realize she’s even out there.
    Ty Burr, BostonGlobe.com, 13 June 2018
  • Meet Cole and Tinn, accidental twins: The goblin Kull was supposed to switch them as newborns but was interrupted, causing him to panic and leave two babies, one human and one changeling, in one crib.
    oregonlive, 20 Oct. 2019
  • That’s what the fight over the changeling boy is all about; surrendering him to Oberon means forfeiting a piece of her own history and identity, involving a woman (the boy’s mother) Titania had dearly loved.
    Mike Fischer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 5 July 2017
  • In rural 19th century Ireland, Nóra suspects that her toddler grandson, whose mother has died, is actually a changeling left by the fairies, or Good People, who cause illness and misfortune.
    USA TODAY, 14 Oct. 2017
  • Superstition around fairies lingered in rural Ireland then, and Cleary recruited Bridget’s family to help drive out this mischief-making changeling.
    Jenny Rogers, Washington Post, 26 Sep. 2019
  • Goslings and ducklings are baby birds, but a groundling is an uncritical or unrefined person (too poor to pay for a seat in Renaissance theaters) and a changeling is a child exchanged by fairies, or any kind of replacement of inferior value.
    Melissa Mohr, The Christian Science Monitor, 28 June 2018
  • These men and women sat in uncomfortable, beat-up school desks determined to learn English — such a difficult language to acquire with its changeling grammar rules and high-maintenance punctuation marks.
    Sarah Fay, Longreads, 17 Mar. 2020
  • The imitations were clearly imitations, less like uncanny meat changelings and more like the Dionne Warwick impersonator at your friendly neighborhood drag bar.
    Soleil Ho, SFChronicle.com, 11 Oct. 2019

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