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 • Feb. 13, 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

Surely, it was argued, the contraction had been severe enough to satisfy the advocates of the most stringent Procrustean policy.

From Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 From Lincoln to Garfield, with a Review of the Events Which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860 by Blaine, James Gillespie