How to Use pidgin in a Sentence

pidgin

noun
  • But the effect is as vivid as the sassy, strong-willed narrator’s pidgin.
    Tsitsi Dangarembga, New York Times, 28 Feb. 2020
  • Hapa is a Hawaiian pidgin word used to describe mixed-race people (usually those who are half Asian and half white).
    Danielle M. Wong, Harper's BAZAAR, 17 Oct. 2017
  • Ed Sheeran takes over the second verse with lyrics peppered with upbeat pidgin and interlaced with words from Yoruba which forms the lyrics of the original song.
    Nelson C.j., Rolling Stone, 27 Dec. 2021
  • The creoles emerged from a first-contact language or pidgin resulting from the contact between the Portuguese colonizers and the slaves from the kingdom of Benin in Sao Tome.
    Uwagbale Edward-Ekpu, Quartz, 23 July 2021
  • Blending several local languages and named after a mixed fruit salad, the pidgin can often be heard in places like street markets.
    Beh Lih Yi, The Christian Science Monitor, 3 Nov. 2020
  • Sometimes her Native American characters speak a cigar-store pidgin to one another, only to drop it further down on the same page.
    William T. Vollmann, New York Times, 17 June 2016
  • Namaste Wahala' loosely translates to 'Hello trouble' and it is filmed in a mix of Hindu and Nigeria's pidgin language.
    Aisha Salaudeen, CNN, 24 Feb. 2020
  • Speaking in a pidgin of French and English, and switching back and forth sometimes within the same sentence, Delphine's story comes out in jagged rambles, which are often heartbreaking.
    Piers Marchant, Arkansas Online, 21 May 2021
  • Japanese immigrants who worked in pineapple fields and on sugarcane plantations introduced their ice-cold kakigori to Hawaii in the late 1800s, where it became known as shave ice in Hawaiian pidgin.
    Omar Mamoon, Janelle Bitker, San Francisco Chronicle, 14 Sep. 2021
  • In the traditional account of this process, a creole most often arose from a pidgin: a simple, improvised argot drawing most of its words from the (usually European) languages of the masters.
    The Economist, 1 Feb. 2018
  • As with his totemic travel writing, exotic settings and a flair for adventure invigorate the otherwise workmanlike prose, and the scenes flash with surfer’s lingo, snatches of Hawaiian pidgin and odes to the ocean.
    Sam Sacks, WSJ, 7 May 2021
  • Many cats and their human companions seem to develop a pidgin language in order to communicate better.
    National Geographic, 28 Mar. 2016
  • Many cats and their human companions seem to develop a pidgin language in order to communicate better.
    National Geographic, 28 Mar. 2016
  • American English is meant to grow wild and woolly on our shores, spawning dialects and pidgins, wantonly consuming foreign words and locutions, anarchically legitimizing slang and warped grammar.
    Virginia Heffernan, WIRED, 28 June 2018

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