How to Use discontinuous in a Sentence

discontinuous

adjective
  • So the internet and what things are on a screen are quick-cut, nonlinear, discontinuous, and flat.
    Todd Vanderwerff, Vox, 25 Aug. 2018
  • New Orleans is sinking, much like her former home in the discontinuous permafrost zone of Alaska.
    Ned Rozell, Anchorage Daily News, 23 Dec. 2017
  • The permafrost around Fairbanks is discontinuous; jagged pieces of it finger north-facing slopes and enfold the low-lying valleys.
    Lois Parshley, Anchorage Daily News, 3 May 2022
  • He was captivated by the arrival of a completely discontinuous force in the world.
    Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 15 Nov. 2021
  • The second Tim, my high-school friend, sees his life as radically discontinuous, and rightly so.
    Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker, 3 Oct. 2022
  • Expected to be too young, too inexperienced, too discontinuous to make any waves in the NBA, the Jazz instead have shocked the league by arriving early.
    Andy Larsen, The Salt Lake Tribune, 9 Nov. 2022
  • The boring parts of his story are salutary, framing the discontinuous dramas.
    Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 14 Sep. 2020
  • To those who want to portray Trump as wholly exceptional, and discontinuous with the recent past, the book is an essential corrective.
    Patrick Iber, The New Republic, 5 Aug. 2021
  • Sometimes the eyes in a portrait peer in different directions, evidence of the discontinuous process.
    Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker, 21 Feb. 2011
  • An excellent way to ensure your fire won’t accidentally spread beyond its base is to make sure its fuel source is discontinuous, Jimenez says, meaning there isn’t stray fuel near the fire.
    Sarah Wells, Popular Mechanics, 13 Sep. 2022
  • In other words, as a consequence of the letter the upper saddle-node bifurcation curve is crossed from below and this crossing implies a discontinuous jump from x' to x''' in the feelings of Elizabeth and Darcy (PP12,...,15).
    Seriously Science, Discover Magazine, 27 Feb. 2014
  • All six Mary Pages are excellent, handing off, as if in a relay race, the baton of the character’s discontinuous personality.
    Jesse Green, New York Times, 12 July 2018
  • Many of the papers debate whether this new model constitutes a truly discontinuous phase transition.
    Jennifer Ouellette, Quanta Magazine, 14 July 2015
  • Obstacles of large and steep variations in ground elevation (relative to the robots height) creating discontinuous paths for walking (i.e. theres a limit to the slope of a terrain that can be walked over which is around 45 degrees for humans).
    IEEE Spectrum, 16 Aug. 2016
  • It should be rejected because penning in the majority of the population in a small, crowded, and discontinuous territory is not the type of compromise that can ever bring peace.
    Omri Boehm, The New York Review of Books, 9 June 2020
  • This episode consists of discontinuous flashes and pockets of incomplete story that together make a rending portrait of the peculiar two-month period Kirsten spent with the Chaudhary brothers.
    Amanda Whiting, Vulture, 30 Dec. 2021
  • To leave the cave is to become educated about the true character of the beings experienced within it, not to discover a radically discontinuous world or reality.
    Damon Linker, The Week, 8 Feb. 2022
  • However, uncertainty coupled with the discontinuous nature of contact can lead to failure in real-world environments with unexpected height variations, such as rocky hills or curbs.
    IEEE Spectrum, 1 July 2022
  • It is construed as transformation, construction and alteration of reality through time; evolution as a discontinuous creation process as well.
    Bruce Sterling, WIRED, 31 May 2013
  • All deal with an unknown future against a backdrop of disruptive and discontinuous operating environments.
    Brad Cousins, Forbes, 23 Sep. 2021
  • The past three presidencies have been jarringly discontinuous in style, temperament, and policy.
    Matthew Continetti, National Review, 19 Sep. 2020
  • The future workforce is discontinuous with the past, and has liberated individuals and organizations from the constraints of geography.
    Jon Younger, Forbes, 10 Aug. 2022
  • As temperatures rise, the boundary between continuous and discontinuous permafrost is expected to migrate north.
    Yereth Rosen, Alaska Dispatch News, 1 Sep. 2017
  • Neither Victorian gays nor New Negroes could simply inherit their identities; instead, each group had to invent its ancestors, piecing them together from discontinuous pasts.
    Julian Lucas, The New Yorker, 11 Aug. 2022
  • But scientists have had a hard time describing the origins and sources of these and many other capacities, because there is nothing qualitatively discontinuous that separates our DNA or neurobiology from our great ape relatives.
    David P. Barash, WSJ, 11 Jan. 2019
  • The stress of discontinuous environments experienced by entrepreneurs, innovators and leaders in crisis all require a level of equanimity in order to maintain resilience.
    Brad Cousins, Forbes, 23 Sep. 2021
  • Though there are theoretical reasons why the variation in genes should be more clinal, the reality remains that cultural parameters are going to shape the outlines of genetic variation, and those parameters are discontinuous.
    Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 27 Apr. 2012
  • In this study, the researchers selected ninety-seven endurance runners (47 women) with diverse running backgrounds to perform, a discontinuous protocol of incremental treadmill running (4- minute stages, 1-kilometer per hour increments).
    NOLA.com, 23 June 2017

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