How to Use world-building in a Sentence

world-building

noun
  • That sort of world-building for your pet won’t come cheap.
    Boone Ashworth, WIRED, 15 Oct. 2024
  • If the first film felt like endless world-building and set-up, have no fear.
    Scott Phillips, Forbes, 4 Jan. 2025
  • That kind of world-building appealed to him more than the story of this kid who becomes a god.
    WIRED, 19 Sep. 2023
  • That is the beauty of Barbie Land logic and world-building.
    André-Naquian Wheeler, Vogue, 20 July 2023
  • People certainly aren’t looking for the next Game of Thrones or the next world-building show.
    Lacey Rose, The Hollywood Reporter, 30 Nov. 2023
  • In this deep dive into world-building, we’re thrust 300 years into the future.
    Randy Myers, The Mercury News, 25 Jan. 2024
  • To date, the SSU has failed to generate the success or world-building Sony hoped for and intended.
    Mark Hughes, Forbes, 12 Dec. 2024
  • Elsewhere in the interview, Elliott discussed some of the plans for world-building in this next film.
    Charlotte Phillipp, Peoplemag, 22 Apr. 2024
  • Billion-dollar world-building aside, The Rings of Power plods.
    TIME, 7 Feb. 2024
  • This Easter egg is Lynchian world-building at its best.
    Max Evry, WIRED, 10 Jan. 2024
  • Burton, long revered for his quirky world-building genius, needs to get his macabre back, bigtime.
    Karen D'souza, The Mercury News, 25 Sep. 2024
  • The result of their joint artistic labor amounts to idiosyncratic world-building with a retro sheen.
    Carlos Aguilar, Variety, 31 Jan. 2025
  • The elaborate world-building and precinct plot yielded a timeless film that would be studied and enjoyed for decades to come.
    Jordan Runtagh, Peoplemag, 31 Mar. 2024
  • Its cross-cultural world-building—etched, with shabbily retro flair, in boxy frames of grainy 16-mm.
    Justin Chang, The New Yorker, 10 Feb. 2025
  • Keith Herron’s world-building with his brand Advisry has been in the making since his teen years.
    Kerane Marcellus, Essence, 8 Sep. 2024
  • Like all world-building for the big screen, recreating the Bridgerton universe based on Julia Quinn’s novels is no small feat.
    Rachel Silva, ELLE Decor, 8 Sep. 2023
  • The visuals the group puts out—the single shot, world-building videos—are clearly a central part of their identity, but the music stands on its own as well.
    Liam Hess, Vogue, 23 Oct. 2023
  • Again, in between the firefights, there is also a lot of immersive world-building and bickering with a robot who has a heart of gold.
    Adrienne So, WIRED, 30 Jan. 2024
  • Readers get all the best parts of swoony love story tropes, magical world-building and high-stakes adventure.
    Clare Mulroy, USA TODAY, 14 Dec. 2024
  • The books are epic in every sense of the word, from their incredible world-building to an extensive cast of characters.
    Milan Polk, Men's Health, 28 Aug. 2023
  • Chu’s vibrant world-building is a significant part of that.
    David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter, 19 Nov. 2024
  • Despite this mild glitch, the Tokyo example is a mind-blowing exercise in world-building.
    Steven Levy, WIRED, 15 Feb. 2024
  • With a new Hellraiser reboot available to stream on Hulu, this is your chance to glory over the gloom, gore, and arch world-building of the original 1987 British horror film.
    EW.com, 19 Dec. 2023
  • Old-money aesthetic is not complete without the requisite world-building: the yacht, the Dom Pérignon, the Lake Como backdrop.
    Sarah Spellings, Vogue, 12 Dec. 2023
  • Will the fanboys go for all this elaborate world-building, inevitably leading to a deadly faceoff on the insurgents’ way home to Veldt?
    David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter, 15 Dec. 2023
  • Moving on from the monograph, the next step for me in world-building was to develop specific spaces and attach a narrative to each one.
    Alessia Glaviano, Vogue, 4 Jan. 2024
  • Players who enjoy the game's lore, world-building, and puzzles are afraid that HoYoverse will end up putting less effort into these aspects of the game when there are options to skip them.
    Thomas G. Moukawsher, Newsweek, 5 Feb. 2025
  • Genre fiction is harder than people want to give it credit for, partly because 90 percent of it is world-building.
    Sara Holdren, Vulture, 28 Oct. 2024
  • Revenge of the Sith is also the most expansive and world-building film in the entire series, for my money, not to mention visually mind-blowing and with a scale that exceeds any of the other films.
    Mark Hughes, Forbes, 26 Feb. 2025
  • His image-making and world-building undoubtedly led it to become acclaimed.
    Robyn Mowatt, Essence, 4 Mar. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'world-building.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: