atavistic

In a sentence

Six example sentences with atavistic, each labelled with its topic.

• The fear of snakes feels atavistic, hardwired long before anyone in the room had ever seen one.

  Psychology

• The film gives its villain an atavistic snarl, as if some far older creature were surfacing through the man.

  Movies

• The crowd's roar had something atavistic in it, thousands of strangers howling as their distant ancestors once did.

  Basketball

• Occasionally a dolphin is born with tiny hind flippers, an atavistic throwback to ancestors that once walked on land.

  Science

• The novel treats the family's stubborn silence as atavistic, a trait resurfacing from ancestors nobody alive can remember.

  Literature

• There is something atavistic in a drum circle, bodies swaying to a pulse older than any written language.

  Music

More Literary words

• felicitous
• execrate
• minatory
• exculpate
• abjure
• apposite
• coruscate
• dissimulate
• recondite
• fecund
• iconoclastic
• mundane