How to Use definable in a Sentence

definable

adjective
  • Not to put that crudely — but there’s a definable goal.
    Sam Gillette, PEOPLE.com, 11 July 2019
  • There was a time in my life when running served a clear and definable purpose.
    Devin, Longreads, 9 Sep. 2020
  • The definable ones suggest Sporting KC isn’t missing the man who led the club in scoring each of the past three seasons.
    Sam McDowell, kansascity, 29 Sep. 2017
  • But the games do need to be good for Netflix — which is not an easily definable trait for Loombe and her team yet.
    Jennifer Maas, Variety, 13 June 2022
  • Of course this isn’t definable, but there have to be parameters for a site.
    Evan Nicole Brown, The Hollywood Reporter, 18 Feb. 2022
  • Players should bet large both with their very best hands and, as bluffs, with some definable percentage of their very worst hands.
    New York Times, 18 Jan. 2022
  • In the immediate days after the killings, the bags were bigger; the remains, more definable.
    Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times, 16 Nov. 2023
  • In some not-quite-definable way, the film itself is all of a piece with Rogers’s principled gentleness.
    Peter Rainer, The Christian Science Monitor, 29 June 2018
  • There may be definable clusters of stars up there which can be seen from Earth as constellations, or there may not be.
    Calvin Trillin, The New Yorker, 21 Apr. 2017
  • There was a set of values – that had sort of been there and implicit, but not wrapped up together in any kind of definable boundary – that came to reshape the culture.
    Amanda Paulson, The Christian Science Monitor, 20 Apr. 2020
  • So much of the success in this league is really geared toward a group of guys being tied together in the locker room and having a set of definable skills.
    Dwain Price, star-telegram.com, 5 May 2017
  • One of the things Sundance has long made clear is that there is no single, easily definable festival.
    Manohla Dargis, New York Times, 25 Jan. 2018
  • The leap from image proliferation on social media to a definable increase in tourism was made — even though not a shred of hard data backs up the claim.
    Christopher Knight Art Critic, Los Angeles Times, 20 Mar. 2021
  • But in most of her depictions, faces and definable people are largely absent, at least as images.
    Trevor Fraser, orlandosentinel.com, 17 June 2019
  • There’s another layer to this as well, one less definable but no less important.
    Zach Osterman, The Indianapolis Star, 16 Nov. 2020
  • And jettisoning silly claptrap about good guys and bad guys, right and wrong, and a clear, easily definable line that demarcates it all.
    Andy Meek, BGR, 4 May 2021
  • This is laudable, and again flying less is a real, definable strategy that companies can easy adopt.
    Ben Baldanza, Forbes, 6 Jan. 2023
  • This format — relaxed, circuitous, able to take in both his own work and also work by others — is particularly well suited to Drake, who’s as definable by his taste as by his sound.
    Jon Caramanica, New York Times, 20 Mar. 2017
  • McCoy and his colleagues believed that more American bloodshed in a conflict without a definable end could no longer be justified.
    George Packer, The Atlantic, 31 Jan. 2022
  • The problem of ozone depletion could be addressed and solved simply by eliminating CFCs, at a readily definable cost.
    IEEE Spectrum, 9 Apr. 2012
  • Ranching’s realm is really, then, definable as being where most people are absent.
    Jennifer Percy, New York Times, 18 Jan. 2018
  • Without some definable parameters, your best intentions can get lost in the shuffle.
    SELF, 30 Dec. 2021
  • Why hasn’t anyone considered the definable and better ROI of modifying the existing act?
    Mercury News Readers, The Mercury News, 8 Feb. 2017
  • The reason reality shows about hoarding flourished a decade ago, the critic Scott Herring has argued, is that hoarding was a special case in which the larger culture tipped into definable deviance.
    Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Harper’s Magazine , 7 Dec. 2021
  • Original older models can sell for thousands of dollars, depending on their condition and a definable artist.
    Brenda Yenke, cleveland, 17 Mar. 2022
  • The cello melody that emerges with falling gestures is instantly memorable but not easily definable.
    Mark Swed, latimes.com, 9 Feb. 2018
  • Unlike cures, which are dramatic and definable—and, therefore, attractive investments—staving off disease in the first place is uneventful and vague, because nothing happens.
    Madeline Drexler, The Atlantic, 20 Oct. 2020
  • Interactions between neurons firing in the brain are also an example of a dynamical system — albeit one that’s especially subtle and hard to pin down in a definable list of rules.
    Quanta Magazine, 21 Aug. 2019
  • Bargaining is a classic game theory problem, Zollman says, and a strike is a great example of a high-stakes contest between two players with different but definable interests.
    WIRED, 1 Oct. 2023
  • Although there have been few concrete, surefire findings that have come out of the study of positive psychology, one success of the field has been to make happiness a definable objective that can be worked for, like money or professional success.
    Cody Delistraty, The Cut, 2 Feb. 2018

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'definable.' 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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