How to Use fester in a Sentence

fester

verb
  • We should deal with these problems now instead of allowing them to fester.
  • His feelings of resentment have festered for years.
  • His wounds festered for days before he got medical attention.
  • Those festering secrets are now out in the open and ready to tear the town apart.
    — Sarah Yang, Sunset Magazine, 7 Feb. 2024
  • Nearly 10% of the bulls died, their corpses thrown overboard or left to fester in the pens among the living.
    — Kevin Varley, Fortune, 8 July 2021
  • But that leaves the rest of the issues between them beyond the seas to continue to fester.
    — Jon Gambrell, Anchorage Daily News, 1 Aug. 2023
  • In the tower, Mahito learns that some forms of care can be like putting a Band-Aid over a festering wound.
    — Moeko Fujii, The New Yorker, 2 May 2024
  • It’s a poison running through … our body politic and it’s been allowed to fester and grow right in front of our eyes.
    — Robin Givhan, Washington Post, 17 May 2022
  • Hate only needs a snippet of daylight to fester and spread.
    — San Diego Union-Tribune, 27 May 2022
  • Yemen’s conflict has been festering for more than a decade.
    — Mohammed Tawfeeq, CNN, 23 July 2023
  • But the fringe is where ideas can fester and become dangerous.
    — Stephanie Halmhofer, Discover Magazine, 14 Oct. 2021
  • The temperatures rose to triple digits, as the water that would not recede festered in the sun.
    — Annie Gowen, Niko Kommenda and Saiyna Bashir, Anchorage Daily News, 5 Sep. 2023
  • By that point, many of the issues that would cause its demise had already begun festering.
    — Jeanna Smialek, New York Times, 31 Mar. 2023
  • And yet, as Faulkner wrote, the past is never past, which means the incident must fester for Twyla and Roberta both.
    — David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times, 17 Feb. 2022
  • Stones have been left unturned, under which the real wormy rot at the center of the SBC continues to fester.
    — Audrey Clare Farley, The New Republic, 30 May 2022
  • There’s a fair amount of body horror here, beginning with a bee-stung hand that continues to fester and flake.
    — Stephanie Zacharek, Time, 27 Aug. 2021
  • The festering issue has spurred three wars between the countries.
    — Rhea Mogul, CNN, 12 Oct. 2023
  • This gap and others allow contaminants to fester in schools across the state.
    — Lulu Ramadan, ProPublica, 14 Mar. 2022
  • The flighting on the Lebanon-Israel border has also re-opened long festering issues over the frontier, known as the blue line.
    — CNN, 13 Apr. 2024
  • Now in 2023, after the problems have festered for years, Beijing seems unable to muster a forceful enough program to deal with the matter.
    — Milton Ezrati, Forbes, 19 Feb. 2024
  • If trust can’t be re-established, this sore spot will fester long after Thomas leaves office in June.
    — Dallas News, 11 Nov. 2022
  • Hate can quickly fester and grow, and even one incident can be a warning sign of a larger problem.
    — San Diego Union-Tribune, 18 Feb. 2022
  • Records show problems have been festering at the facility, also called the JDF, since at least last year.
    — Gina Kaufman, Detroit Free Press, 28 Oct. 2022
  • But The Humans draws its most potent tension from the way that each of the Blakes tries to suppress their dread, leaving it to fester and then emerge in cruel behavior.
    — Shirley Li, The Atlantic, 1 Dec. 2021
  • When a team’s brightest star is frustrated and upset, that’s a problem that will either fester or get healed.
    — Gordon Monson, The Salt Lake Tribune, 25 May 2021
  • These theories fester and then seep into the mainstream.
    — New York Times, 20 Mar. 2022
  • In the film’s most remarkable set piece, shot in the town hall in a single, 17-minute take, all of the community’s festering rages and resentments come through.
    — Peter Rainer, The Christian Science Monitor, 27 Apr. 2023
  • Letting these feelings build up and fester can quickly lead to burnout and, in the worst cases, resignation.
    — Steven Salaets, Forbes, 9 Aug. 2022
  • Without those, even simple injuries can fester and the limb may need to be amputated.
    — Mithil Aggarwal, NBC News, 18 Jan. 2024
  • Then again, maybe nothing changes, and this entire mess might just continue to fester into a needless grudge match.
    — Bob McManaman, The Arizona Republic, 19 Sep. 2021

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

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