procrustean

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

The wild variety of American life can never be clamped down on the Procrustean bed of a single form of schooling.

From The Wall Street Journal • Jan. 9, 2026

These accounts illuminate how lawyers, as well as authors, must be skillful narrative crafters, pruning and stretching the unruly features of real life to fit the law’s Procrustean parameters.

From New York Times • Jan. 21, 2020

There is grandeur in this new view of life, so why force it into the Procrustean bed of nineteenth-century theorizing?

From Scientific American • Jun. 15, 2019

His verdicts, moreover, remain freshly minted and remarkably perceptive, however much he crams them into the Procrustean bed of his analytical framework.

From The Guardian • Oct. 17, 2016

You have been well trained, and yet measured by no Procrustean bed, for your most living teacher never wore any fetters herself, and could not impose any.

From Guide to the Kindergarten and Intermediate Class and Moral Culture of Infancy. by Mann, Mary E.