How to Use a means to an end in a Sentence

a means to an end

noun phrase

• Rather, our investors see ESG best practices as a means to an end.
  — Cole Shephard, Fortune, 22 Aug. 2023
• Apartments, we’re told, were once a means to an end, to getting a larger home.
  — Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 11 Nov. 2023
• The data should be a means to an end, though, not a source of validation in its own right.
  — Samantha Kleinberg, STAT, 8 Jan. 2024
• Profits are critical, to be sure; but profits are a means to an end.
  — Alan Murray, Fortune, 7 July 2023
• In some of these stories, the genre elements are a means to an end rather than the principal focus.
  — Dexter Palmer, Washington Post, 11 Apr. 2023
• Her appearance in Mean Girls: The Musical was a means to an end tied to her biggest goals as an artist.
  — Emily Zemler, Rolling Stone, 15 Dec. 2023
• In the run-up to the Iraq War, diplomacy and weapons inspections became a means to an end: building a casus belli.
  — Foreign Affairs, 18 Oct. 2012
• Drafting was not a means to an end, artistic or architectural.
  — Jonathon Keats, Forbes, 20 Apr. 2023
• And even then, most were merely a means to an end—practical but undeniably ugly.
  — Nina Molina, WSJ, 26 Aug. 2023
• Working as a journalist covering the police beat in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Michael Connelly believed his reporter’s job would be a means to an end in becoming a best-selling author one day.
  — Demetrius Patterson, The Hollywood Reporter, 21 Oct. 2023
• Other signature elements, like the Gothic pointed arch, developed simply as a means to an end.
  — Kate McGregor, House Beautiful, 14 July 2023
• The researchers refer to this pernicious thought pattern as an ‘instrumental perspective.’ Such a perspective can slowly objectify your partner, turning them into a means to an end for you.
  — Mark Travers, Forbes, 7 May 2023
• Companies exploit people’s desire for connection by portraying their brands as a means to an end for defining personal identification and values—promises that inevitably fall short and only lead to more self-interested consumption and unhappiness.
  — Rachel Nuwer, Time, 6 June 2023

Last Updated: 29 Aug 2024