legitimate

They were following their legitimate instructions to their logical conclusion.

From Slate ● Oct. 25, 2026

Macron in a Sunday speech acknowledged that fuel prices and cost of living were legitimate concerns, and noted that they were shared in other European capitals.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 24, 2026

She described what has happened as "personally and professionally difficult" and said the NHS "needs to remember that patients come first" and it should "listen to staff who raise legitimate concerns."

From BBC ● Oct. 23, 2026

He soon ascended from nonfactor to legitimate contender.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 23, 2026

“I think she means it as a legitimate question,” said Scythe Meir.

From "Scythe" by Neal Shusterman

“But someone like Carlson is also important because he legitimates those ideas, making them seem less radical when viewers see them.”

From New York Times ● May 15, 2022

“Selling them solidifies and legitimates the selling of our trauma,” she said.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 7, 2021

“When ‘winning’ becomes everything, and winning means dehumanizing the other side for short‐term gain, it legitimates increasingly extreme behavior on both sides,” Mr. Drutman said.

From Washington Times ● Nov. 5, 2020

Blight is only partly right, in that the greatest threat to our society is a collective ignorance that legitimates forms of organized forgetting, modes of social amnesia, and the death of civic literacy.

From Salon ● Jan. 19, 2020

“Well, then,” says I, “necessity legitimates my advice, for it is the only way to save our lives.”

From Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

The market was legitimated by its own success, as experienced in people's daily lives.

From Salon ● May 7, 2020

When Wade says he couldn’t admit what happened to him because his success and well-being in many ways legitimated the story of his entire family’s fragmentation and even his father’s suicide—that makes sense to me.

From Slate ● Mar. 3, 2019

The graffiti is first; Klara’s more culturally legitimated art comes after.

From The Guardian ● Aug. 21, 2015

No. No, the only absolutely clear legacy of JFK’s slaying is that it legitimated the conspiracy theorists.

From Time ● Nov. 19, 2013

Agnes Hepburn, another daughter of the late Patrick Bishop of Murray, was also legitimated on 8th Feb.

From The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) by David Laing

When their daughter became Elizabeth I in 1558, she restored Anne’s title and Anne’s image joined the legitimating Tudor lineup that proliferated in the long galleries of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 22, 2026

"After legitimating his position in broader Israeli circles, he will proceed to the realms that not all agree on - namely the West Bank," Asa-El said.

From Reuters ● Dec. 30, 2022

On a larger scale, the educational force of the wider culture has been transformed into a spectacle for violence and trivialized entertainment, and a tool for legitimating ignorance.

From Salon ● Jun. 24, 2017

The declining power of this particular legitimating story matters a great deal, since skepticism has grown about other tales dear to the party.

From Slate ● Jan. 17, 2013

Cæsar himself became cardinal, September 20, 1493, the stain of his birth having been removed by the Cardinals Pallavicini and Orsini, who had been charged with legitimating him.

From Lucretia Borgia According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day by Ferdinand Gregorovius