How to Use totem in a Sentence

totem

noun

• Private jets are a totem of success among extremely wealthy people.
• The dolls loomed large as objects of beauty and as totems of the past.
  — Meryl Gordon, Town & Country, 21 May 2014
• The Cup was a magnet, a sacred totem and a source of joy.
  — Adam Kilgore, chicagotribune.com, 8 June 2018
• These guys ain't played a game, always hurt, and at the bottom of the totem pole.
  — Andrew Joseph, USA TODAY, 5 July 2017
• In any case, the group did take from the site 10 totem and house poles as well as smaller items.
  — Nancy Lord, Anchorage Daily News, 3 Oct. 2021
• These guys ain’t played a game, [are] always hurt, and [are] at the bottom of the totem pole.
  — Jonathan Tannenwald, Philly.com, 29 June 2017
• Liz leaps down from the risers and runs out to drag the giant totem and move the tables.
  — David Gordon, Harper's magazine, 6 Jan. 2020
• The camera is Bing’s totem of power, her passport to the world.
  — Steven Litt, cleveland, 12 July 2020
• In totem, Christiansen, wrote about the arts in Chicago for even longer than Weiss.
  — Chris Jones, chicagotribune.com, 8 Feb. 2018
• We’re connected to the sea and my totem is a sea turtle.
  — Brooke Blurton, refinery29.com, 12 Dec. 2022
• The Corvette is seen too often as an anachronism or a sad totem of mid-life crises.
  — Dan Carney, Popular Science, 2 Jan. 2020
• The Man in Black kept the scalp with him as a totem, but how the symbol got there was never explained.
  — Bryan Bishop, The Verge, 11 June 2018
• Along the shoulder, ashen wisps of tree trunks stand sentinel like totem poles.
  — Lauren Frayer, latimes.com, 20 June 2017
• The movie was practically a totem of childhood in the ‘90s: MJ!
  — Andrew R. Chow, Time, 19 July 2021
• And so the totems were born of the group’s desire to step away from the paper-swatch paint store paradigm.
  — Asad Syrkett, Curbed, 30 Nov. 2018
• Your movie was held up as this totem of boomer nostalgia and the other movie was the fresh new thing.
  — David Marchese, New York Times, 10 June 2022
• All the other pieces are wood — chunky disks for the rocks, thin disks for the totems, and rectangles (long and short) for the hammers.
  — Jonathan H. Liu, WIRED, 29 Feb. 2012
• Keith Wolfe Smarch hand carved the totem poles that are dotted around the Commons.
  — Karen Gardiner, Condé Nast Traveler, 26 Oct. 2022
• The totem acted as a reminder that my daughter had been through so much more.
  — Lindzi Scharf, Peoplemag, 18 July 2024
• There is no greater totem of a time gone by than the infamous Scott Boras Binders.
  — Tom Verducci, SI.com, 2 Feb. 2018
• This earth, scooped from the hometown of Toni Morrison is my totem.
  — Time, 7 Aug. 2019
• Even the youthful players in this big field look to its totems who existed on the fringes.
  — Andrew Dansby, Houston Chronicle, 25 Oct. 2017
• Good luck totems can carry a skater only so far, though.
  — JerÉ Longman, New York Times, 4 Jan. 2018
• In the standing room only section, a flag for Third Man Records flapped in the breeze atop a handheld totem.
  — Doug MacCash, NOLA.com, 7 May 2018
• The group has carved and painted more than 110 totem poles in the past three decades for homes for veterans, schools and other groups.
  — Washington Post, 28 Mar. 2021
• Was the decision to put Zari 1.0 back in the totem only due to budgetary reasons?
  — Chancellor Agard, EW.com, 3 June 2020
• In one, Dopey becomes a mutant totem pole, each of his faces bigger than the one below it.
  — David Pagel, latimes.com, 14 Aug. 2017
• On the top of the hip-hop totem poll, less is more has also become an abiding concept for Kanye West.
  — Dan Deluca, Philly.com, 22 June 2018
• The vessels are presented in a circle, at the center of which is a totem surrounded by small drinking and cooking pots.
  — Jane Levere, Forbes, 30 Sep. 2024
• And Eric’s insecurities all come flooding back and Kenny is the totem of that.
  — Ben Travers, IndieWire, 11 Aug. 2024

Last Updated: 17 Nov 2024