symbolic

In a sentence

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

• The painter's white lily is symbolic, standing for a purity the sitter's own letters never once claimed.

  Art

• The handshake was purely symbolic, since neither delegation had authority to sign anything binding that afternoon.

  Politics

• Formal logic is symbolic, replacing sentences with letters so that the shape of an argument can be checked mechanically.

  Philosophy

• Early artificial intelligence was symbolic, storing knowledge as rules about chess pieces rather than learning from millions of games.

  Technology

• Symbolic play begins around age two, when a child hands you a wooden block and insists it is a cup of tea.

  Psychology

• The green light in Gatsby is symbolic, and generations of students have argued over exactly what it stands for.

  Literature

Found in these word lists

Found in 3 published word listsAuthoritative

• Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000)
• New Academic Word List (Browne/Culligan/Phillips 2013)
• Academic Keyword List (Paquot 2010)

Each source is a published word list that contains symbolic. No exam board publishes an official GRE, GMAT or SAT list; GMAT words come from GRE lists and the Academic Word List.

More Academic words

• scenario
• dominance
• integrate
• illustration
• supplement
• straightforward
• fundamentally
• evolutionary
• assisted
• turbulent
• aided
• taped