How to Use palimpsest in a Sentence

palimpsest

noun
  • The ancient city is an architectural palimpsest.
  • The Kessel find is a double palimpsest because the parchment was then used a third time.
    Tim Newcomb, Popular Mechanics, 11 Apr. 2023
  • Still, the portrait accrues meaning when viewed as a palimpsest.
    Alexandra Styron, New York Times, 11 Feb. 2020
  • Georgetown is a good place to glimpse such palimpsests, which include the cobbles and streetcar tracks on O and P streets.
    John Kelly, Washington Post, 31 Aug. 2019
  • The code, a sort of palimpsest by now, becomes difficult to understand.
    Ellen Ullman, WIRED, 1 Apr. 1999
  • Like the establishment itself, Tuxedo’s menu is a palimpsest, revealing both the past and the present.
    Becky Cooper, The New Yorker, 13 Feb. 2017
  • The palimpsests were made from a stretched leather that would have been laborious and expensive to produce at the time.
    Sarah Gibbens, National Geographic, 11 July 2017
  • What remains is a palimpsest of culture and history, as layered as a cross section of the earth itself.
    Christopher Bollen, New York Times, 18 Feb. 2020
  • How such a storied place came to be ignored by most tourists is explained by its palimpsest quality.
    Tamar Adler, Condé Nast Traveler, 31 May 2017
  • Thus, the home is also a palimpsest of her long career spent at the nexus of the worlds of fashion, art and design, and nearly everything in it has a story to tell.
    Laura May Todd, New York Times, 7 Sep. 2021
  • The line applies uncannily well to Las Vegas, that garish palimpsest of shrines to vice and Mammon.
    Christine Cipriani, WSJ, 7 Apr. 2017
  • This sudden lumpy palimpsest — the absence of his body, the presence of mine — hit me, in that moment, as outrageous and weird and sad and embarrassing and funny.
    New York Times, 11 May 2022
  • The key coastal towns include Positano, a wedding cake of colors tumbling down to the water, and Amalfi, a palimpsest of architectural eras.
    Lauren Mowery, Forbes, 31 Dec. 2022
  • Dating him forces her to reconceptualize the city not as a symbol—a palimpsest of elsewheres—but as a real location.
    Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 3 Oct. 2019
  • Caillebotte was fascinated by the transition, and by the way the city could be read as a kind of palimpsest, one historical layer on top of another.
    Washington Post, 20 Jan. 2021
  • Subsequent impact events can heat up parts of a rock, glazing it with fields from later times and creating a magnetic palimpsest.
    Byzack Savitsky, science.org, 20 Dec. 2022
  • The real legacy of this entire ugly debacle, then, may never be fully known: a palimpsest of stories not told, of justice not sought.
    Jessica Winter, The New Yorker, 2 June 2022
  • The road there led west through a palimpsest of onetime front lines to an army encampment, where four domed tents, their tarpaulin covers tattered and torn by the wind, had been erected for receiving refugees.
    National Geographic, 17 Oct. 2016
  • Which is perhaps because Shyne Barrow is an actual 43-year-old palimpsest, a bunch of guys baked into one: the rap phenom, the convict, the religious scholar, the statesman.
    Sean Williams, Rolling Stone, 22 May 2022
  • Visitors will need to respect the rules of the mosques in Turkey and dress appropriately, but there is no longer a fee to experience the ultimate palimpsest of a building.
    Katie Nadworny, Travel + Leisure, 16 Aug. 2021
  • The palimpsest of time is an enduring fascination for Barada in a city that is constantly morphing, sometimes in ways that erode the quality of life.
    Hamish Bowles, Vogue, 6 Apr. 2018
  • In the living room, a primary-colored Ida Kohlmeyer hangs opposite from a palimpsest-like painting by Nicole Charbonnet.
    Susan Langenhennig, NOLA.com, 17 May 2017
  • In the spacious interiors, walls are pared back to brick or sanded down to a palimpsest of paint layers resembling an expressionist canvas.
    Cnt Editors, Condé Nast Traveler, 23 Aug. 2019
  • Phelps and his fellow researchers are making images of the palimpsests available online, so scholars can explore the secret writings that have recently been brought to light.
    Brigit Katz, Smithsonian, 5 Sep. 2017
  • The photographs capture reality but, by repetition, distort the image until what’s left is a blurred and layered palimpsest of form and tone.
    OregonLive.com, 3 Jan. 2018
  • Centuries of paint, layer upon layer, peel away, a palimpsest of fine intentions measured in the warm earth tones of the south—terra-cotta, russet, rose madder, ocher; colors that were the latest thing in Caesar's day.
    Stanley Stewart, Condé Nast Traveler, 22 Mar. 2021
  • What is even more intriguing about this discovery, though, is that the codex found is actually a palimpsest, meaning that the original writings were scraped from their parchment to make way for other texts to be written on top of them.
    Joshua Hawkins, BGR, 22 Oct. 2022
  • The plot of the first Frozen is an obvious palimpsest of script drafts with a nonsensical heel turn at the end, sufficiently ridiculous to be mocked via summary by the snowman Olaf in one of the sequel’s few genuinely funny sequences.
    Ross Douthat, National Review, 9 Jan. 2020
  • Some of the iron beams and storage closets from that era are still visible — details Tieghi-Walker appreciated as a palimpsest of the previous occupants’ influence on the space.
    Diana Budds, Curbed, 2 Nov. 2022
  • His weapons were painted with a palimpsest of names and references, many of them to historical figures associated with the Crusades and other Christian wars against Muslims.
    Hari Kunzru, The New York Review of Books, 10 Mar. 2020

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