as in cliché
an idea or expression that has been used by many people
ended his letter with the overused truism, "You can't win them all!"
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Recent Examples of truism
One ironclad truism about sports is that all streaks eventually come to an end.
—
Pete Grathoff, Kansas City Star, 2 Oct. 2025
This corresponds to a common intuition and truism about crime being a young man’s game, with criminality being most pronounced among younger people (mostly men) and less common among older people.
—The Editorial Board, Oc Register, 1 Oct. 2025
Vance and Miller spoke as if this were a truism.
—Jonathan Blitzer, New Yorker, 20 Sep. 2025
There is a truism that a good place to live is a good place to visit—and that relationship often creates a virtuous cycle of development.
—Jasmine Laws, MSNBC Newsweek, 20 Aug. 2025
See All Example Sentences for truism
Recent Examples of Synonyms for truism
Noun
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Throughout all of Lowe’s platitudes and boosterism, my attention was rapt, and my mind never wandered.—
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After, Sutton Stracke offered platitudes while answering questions about her fractured relationships with ex-assistant Avi Gabay and Garcelle Beauvais.—
Noun
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In the last year, after all, heartrending images like these have become part of the ordinary, the everyday, the commonplace.—
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But in between these commonplace alerts are empty spaces people wake into as to a sort of apnea.—
Noun
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And there’s a proverb, this idea of the secret of getting old.—
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For nine months, Erasmus spent his short nights in a modest dorm and his long days in the print shop, expanding on his collection of proverbs Adagiorum chiliades while Aldus proofread, craftsman carefully laying sets of print and rolling paper through the press.—
Noun
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There is so much pleasure to be had in rereading old favorites—and part of the joy is meeting beloved characters, who have been updated or somehow arrive in a new form to resist old tropes and types.—
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The other one that happens to me more regularly is seeing common tropes or scenarios from the media and tipping them just slightly on their side.—
Noun
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Turnovers come in bunches, the saying goes.—
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Kids can be cruel, as the old saying goes.—
Noun
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Openness comes from these encounters with banality and consistency.—
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As far back as the Victorian era, exchanging a few banalities was part of a veritable social code—a way of signaling both politeness and boundaries.—
Noun
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Doping the Undopable The work focuses on cesium lead bromide nanoparticles known as CsPbBr3.—
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There is a reason why the apocalyptic bromides about the state of print haven’t come to fruition, other than for disposable periodicals and newspapers.—
Cite this Entry
“Truism.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/truism. Accessed 13 Jan. 2026.
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