How to Use ennoble in a Sentence

ennoble

verb
  • He was ennobled by the queen.
  • Her skill and talent ennoble her profession.
  • Ritz, in his too-small shoes, may have felt ennobled by the presence of Princess Alexandra and the Duc d’Orléans.
    The Economist, 12 Apr. 2018
  • Their lies are not ennobled by their positions; quite the contrary.
    Philip Bump, Washington Post, 1 Aug. 2017
  • The scientific method, applied as it is meant to be, ennobles us.
    Rick Pescatore, Philly.com, 5 Oct. 2017
  • At the same time, the religious elements in Crossroads work to ennoble the minutiae that Franzen embraces at last.
    Becca Rothfeld, The Atlantic, 4 Oct. 2021
  • In posing that question, William Shakespeare discounted the importance of a name, noting that the ennobling power of love made one's name but an afterthought.
    Theodore P. Mahne, NOLA.com, 23 Apr. 2018
  • But worse is the show’s stark juxtaposition of gay men ennobled mostly by aesthetic graces (and canned wit) and straight men zhuzhed up before being sent out to live better, fuller lives.
    Richard Lawson, HWD, 30 May 2018
  • That calls for a new program and offers us a new opportunity to try and improve the systems currently in peril—and to ennoble the great things that are happening around us….
    Bruce Sterling, WIRED, 10 June 2011
  • What Gadsby did was give the audience permission — moral permission — to turn their backs on what challenged them, and to ennoble a preference for comfort and kitsch.
    Jason Farago, New York Times, 1 June 2023
  • Two Wheels Good is clearly the work of a writer who loves to ride his bicycle but declines to ennoble it with odes to environmental virtue or social justice.
    Curbed, 25 May 2022
  • In a way, that's what Gunderson's done here, by reviving her story, at once humanizing and ennobling her struggle.
    Tony Adler, Chicago Reader, 6 June 2018
  • But those are just the jealous snipings of people who have not yet given into the purest and most warming fact of the moment, that the president’s supreme lifestyle will eventually lift and ennoble us all.
    Richard Lawson, Vanities, 6 July 2017
  • Set aside for a moment the fact that the conduct of a war can ennoble even when the outcome is likely doomed, as is generally believed of the Ukrainians, led by the astonishing Volodymyr Zelensky.
    Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 14 Mar. 2022
  • Its secondary hero is ennobled by a folksy wisdom and probity so unalloyed as to border on the supernatural.
    Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic, 12 Mar. 2024
  • The narrative we’re given as Americans is that illness ennobles you.
    Julie Zauzmer, Washington Post, 2 June 2017
  • In its lavish display of thriving life, the greenery seems both to reflect her fate and to ennoble her immediate experience.
    Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 5 May 2022
  • The goal is to further polarize the nation politically, to ennoble its voters, and to quash the opposition.
    Mateusz Mazzini, Washington Post, 27 Feb. 2018
  • When that decency expresses itself — in dozens of portraits of a missing girl, in the epiphanies of a prison poetry class — an ennobling dignity begins to suggest that a deep goodness might be a match for our madness.
    Smith Henderson, New York Times, 4 Jan. 2017
  • And the dish that takes you out of a bistro and into a fine-dining temple — blushing beef tenderloin topped with near-liquid roasted marrow — is ennobled with a moistener of black truffles, Madeira and a veal reduction that takes three days to make.
    Tom Sietsema, Washington Post, 21 Apr. 2023
  • Chocolate cake ennobled with hazelnuts and chocolate ganache is a bar raiser — and a welcome sight during a midnight refrigerator raid.
    Tom Sietsema, Washington Post, 24 June 2019
  • His mother’s family was well connected with the great tapestry artisans of Beauvais, and his father’s had been ennobled in the 18th century.
    Eric Wilson, New York Times, 12 Mar. 2018
  • In other words, a grand company continually needing rescue from the abyss, an ennobling endeavor, a way to communicate across time and space.
    John Koethe, The New York Review of Books, 23 May 2019
  • Johnson writes, and damned if the human capacity for dawdling over Candy Crush and skipping after shiny objects isn’t convincingly ennobled here.
    Virginia Heffernan, New York Times, 22 Nov. 2016
  • Making and thinking with these leftovers from the production gave rise to a notion of making a building of them as a sympathetic way of using and ennobling scrap materials that would otherwise have been used as firewood.
    Kimberley Mok, Treehugger, 28 Mar. 2023
  • Art Deco deluxe, when American architects deployed whole arsenals of Italianate and neo-medieval styles to ennoble their high-rise palazzos.
    Curbed, 18 Aug. 2022
  • That would scarcely have been necessary if not for the unstated recognition that a more respectable justification was needed to ennoble the bloodshed.
    Dan McLaughlin, National Review, 11 Oct. 2017
  • Notwithstanding, the kashrut laws carry powerful ethical lessons – lessons that can help ennoble and sanctify our lives.
    Rabbi Avi Weiss, Jewish Journal, 9 Apr. 2018
  • Action/adventure lends itself to the heroic gesture in music which ennobles us, and romance lends itself to the passionate and melodic – elements that every musician schooled in the classics lives for.
    Courtney Devores, charlotteobserver, 18 Oct. 2017
  • While Schenkkan's script is basically true to history, the playwright does slide toward hagiography and ennobles Johnson beyond the evidence.
    Theodore P. Mahne, NOLA.com, 29 May 2018

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