How to Use defile in a Sentence

defile

verb

• To the very end no image of Churchill defiles the sanctity of this film’s safe space.
  — Dorothy Rabinowitz, WSJ, 20 July 2017
• Even so, the Pope disbanded the order since the whole heresy mess had defiled its name.
  — National Geographic, 12 May 2016
• He was charged with murder, rape and abduction with the intent to defile.
  — Steve Helling, PEOPLE.com, 17 Nov. 2021
• And there might have been just a little pity for the desperate, cornered liar who’d defiled his office.
  — Peggy Noonan, WSJ, 29 Nov. 2018
• Besides homicide, he also was found guilty of rape and of defiling corpses.
  — Chris Buckley, New York Times, 30 Mar. 2018
• The Seleucids captured the holy Temple and defiled it by erecting an altar to the Greek god Zeus inside.
  — Amy Briggs, National Geographic, 19 Dec. 2019
• Defiled and broken as the once-great automobile capital can seem, the past five years have seen great progress.
  — Kat Bein, Billboard, 31 May 2017
• Pornography destroys the purity of the mind of the individual and defiles the conscience of the Nation.
  — Leah Sottile, Longreads, 20 July 2019
• Other cities defiled their lakefronts, but Chicago didn’t.
  — John Kass, chicagotribune.com, 12 June 2019
• The sublime defiled, the sacred embedded in a thing of vanity, ridiculed, pirated, usurped, stolen.
  — Cynthia Ozick, The New Yorker, 24 July 2023
• Ghost nets entangling turtles, plastic bags defiling corals, and straws in the guts of fish existed in a different world.
  — Jenni Marsh, CNN, 7 June 2018
• His contempt for tourists and transplants who don’t abide the old folkways is uncompromised — young people show up to get drunk and defile the East Village, never to teach poor children in Brownsville.
  — Ginia Bellafante, New York Times, 27 Sep. 2017
• Police charged Brevard with abduction with intent to defile in the Homewood Suites attack.
  — Washington Post, 27 Mar. 2022
• And the lighthearted music at the opera’s end was defied — defiled? — by a heavy-handed upstage military assault.
  — Scott Cantrell, Dallas News, 30 Mar. 2023
• Always expect to be disturbed, defiled and maybe even delighted.
  — Katie Walsh, Twin Cities, 4 July 2019
• Both journeys displayed how the forest was being defiled and colonised by outsiders: rubber-seekers who bled the trees and massacred the tribes, crazed religious sects.
  — The Economist, 28 May 2020
• As Charlier and his co-authors wrote in their paper last week, Hitler had demanded in his will that the Soviet forces about to overrun Berlin not be allowed to defile his corpse.
  — Avi Selk, Washington Post, 20 May 2018
• Three years earlier, a mother of five from Punjab was convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to hang, after she was accused of defiling the name of the Prophet Mohammed.
  — Sophia Saifi, CNN, 17 Aug. 2023
• Krystal wouldn’t be defiled this early Tuesday morning — not after that Monday night.
  — Michael Casagrande | [e-mail], al, 14 Jan. 2020
• The quick answer is that seven-inning games defile the traditions of what has been America’s most-traditional game.
  — Patrick Reusse, Star Tribune, 15 Aug. 2020
• Earlier this summer, a German visitor defiled a temple by roaming through it without a stitch of clothes.
  — Christopher Elliott | On Travel, Anchorage Daily News, 13 July 2023
• To plow it over is to defile the type of humanistic giving that has become scarce in our increasingly billionaires-take-all way of American life.
  — Maria Panaritis, Philly.com, 2 June 2018
• His family, citing their Muslim faith, which doesn’t allow for bodies to be defiled after death, did not allow his brain to be analyzed.
  — Tod Leonard, sandiegouniontribune.com, 12 Dec. 2017
• The song describes a royal procession during the Raj Jat—a pilgrimage held in the region every 12 years to worship the goddess Nanda Devi—that defiled the holy landscape with dancing girls.
  — Kristin Romey, National Geographic, 20 Aug. 2019
• Earlier this summer, a German visitor defiled a temple by roaming through it without wearing a stitch of clothes.
  — Christopher Elliott, Dallas News, 12 July 2023
• For the past decade, seeing women who look like me — Asian women — in sexual contexts has meant seeing women who look like me being abused, dominated, and defiled.
  — Maureen O’Connor, The Cut, 11 June 2017
• Yet even if one were inclined to defend their tactics—and argue, for example, that the activists showed admirable restraint by choosing to defile paintings that were protected by a pane of glass—the protests still fail on their own terms.
  — Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic, 27 Oct. 2022
• As one of the most popular game reserves in the country, Sibuya is unfortunately familiar with poachers and their efforts to kill and defile rare animals.
  — Kelli Bender, PEOPLE.com, 5 July 2018
• Inside, what was once the pinnacle of aspirational luxury in New York has been defiled by bankruptcy.
  — Kim Bhasin, chicagotribune.com, 6 Dec. 2019
• Allegiances shift and high jinks ensue as our cursing, sword-swinging protagonist gets incarcerated, blown up, shot, stabbed, defiled and maimed in order to do the right thing.
  — Brian Truitt, USA TODAY, 14 May 2018

Last Updated: 5 Sep 2024