How to Use forbidding in a Sentence

forbidding

adjective
  • The hadal zone is the earth’s most forbidding frontier.
    Susan Casey, Outside Online, 22 Oct. 2019
  • When bad things go down in Charles Dickens, the scene is set in a forbidding moor.
    Washington Post, 10 Aug. 2021
  • When Gary heads out to find him, the story grows forbidding and a little kinky.
    Anita Felicelli, Washington Post, 16 Mar. 2023
  • But here’s where the movie starts to beckon us onto a rather forbidding track.
    Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 9 Apr. 2024
  • Rather, the moon is wet, abundant with water that is largely stored away in the form of ice in the forbidding craters at its poles.
    Christian Davenport, Washington Post, 9 Jan. 2023
  • The future may be unknown and forbidding, but one thing is clear.
    Matthew Continetti, National Review, 13 Oct. 2023
  • The west coast of Ireland is home to miles of wild and forbidding landscape, and the warmest most hospitable people in the world.
    Usa Today Travel Team, USA TODAY, 31 Dec. 2020
  • These are totems to people who made art through forbidding years.
    Jenn Pelly, New York Times, 22 Oct. 2020
  • All are intended to make the city feel less forbidding.
    Curbed, 17 Feb. 2023
  • Yet the most forbidding aspect of the movie isn’t any of those squeamish occurrences.
    Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 23 May 2022
  • The exterior looks forbidding, but the inside of the home is park-lodge chic, with hand-hewn southern white oak and 47 one-of-a-kind doors.
    Pamela Wright, BostonGlobe.com, 4 Aug. 2023
  • Like them, she will be greeted by a forbidding array of problems.
    Stephen Castle, BostonGlobe.com, 5 Sep. 2022
  • In the clinical white of the gallery, art can be forbidding, aggrieved, elite, academic.
    Walker Mimms, New York Times, 4 Jan. 2024
  • Hit the tee shot at least 250 yards into what could be a decidedly forbidding wind.
    Jin Yu Young, New York Times, 19 July 2023
  • Nearly all wild horses live in the Great Basin of Nevada and surrounding states, in some of the most forbidding land in America.
    New York Times, 12 May 2018
  • Rollin’s depiction of the area is stark and forbidding, though his depiction of the lovers is natural and charming.
    Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader, 1 Mar. 2018
  • The East Village streets during the pandemic became forbidding places at 2 o’clock in the morning, when the puppy needed a walk.
    John Leland, BostonGlobe.com, 21 May 2022
  • And her absence at St. Paul’s, while not a surprise given the forbidding logistics, was a letdown.
    Mark Landler, New York Times, 4 June 2022
  • The elder Trump is cast as a cold and forbidding patriarch who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps – his eldest son.
    David Jackson, USA TODAY, 8 July 2020
  • These were simplified brief restatements of the forbidding articles of 1960 on which they were based.
    Brian Domitrovic, Forbes, 4 Apr. 2021
  • This wasn’t a joyous festival of sport; this was a forbidding fortress of separation.
    Christine Brennan, USA TODAY, 21 Feb. 2022
  • Children and families came in through a forbidding brick entrance.
    James S. Russell, New York Times, 8 Nov. 2020
  • This would supply the template for two later books, in which a single vicious memory is at once forbidding and revealing—an event as lock and key.
    Tobi Haslett, Harper's Magazine, 18 Sep. 2023
  • Exactly how the Devils River got its forbidding name is lost to history, but there is little doubt the harsh terrain and fierce natives who once reigned here played a role.
    John MacCormack, ExpressNews.com, 19 June 2020
  • Celebrities have a unique power to amplify an issue to a wide and diverse audience, and make a touchy subject less forbidding.
    Fiorella Valdesolo, Vogue, 11 Dec. 2023
  • Southwell, hands folded and eyes focused laser-like ahead of him, sits formally before a rich green wall nearly as forbidding as his dark clothing.
    Los Angeles Times, 26 Oct. 2021
  • Perhaps its rightful home is streaming, but that’s just a way of saying that in its stolid and forbidding way, it seems destined to be tossed, like everything else, into the vast sea of content.
    Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 17 May 2023
  • Coach Frank Reich better find some bubble gum and baling wire in the coming weeks if his team is to survive its forbidding early season schedule.
    Nate Davis, USA TODAY, 12 Aug. 2021
  • The fences at Arizona's Capitol have made for a forbidding sight at what has long served as a public square in a city famous for otherwise lacking any obvious center.
    Andrew Oxford, azcentral, 10 June 2020
  • But that crusade will come up against a thorny and forbidding set of complications, according to civil liberty experts — no matter how fired up the Swifties are.
    Miles Klee, Rolling Stone, 25 Jan. 2024

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