How to Use fractal in a Sentence

fractal

noun
  • In fact, the lake's fractal outline gives it a shoreline more than 1,900 miles long.
    Ken Jennings, Condé Nast Traveler, 27 Mar. 2017
  • And the most appealing of these might be the fractal what-ifs: What got left behind?
    Wired, 18 Nov. 2019
  • Nearby, a Grecian bust is caught, mid-scream; a fractal seems to turn; the cat’s eyes appear to widen.
    Washington Post, 24 Dec. 2019
  • Long tiers of candles burned around the piano, light poured in a velvety haze from the ceiling, and fractals purled and oozed on a screen at the back of the stage.
    Dan Piepenbring, The New Yorker, 2 Sep. 2019
  • Over the course of his career, his use of fractal patterns increased, and seeking out these spirals has even been used to root out fake paintings.
    Erin Blakemore, Smithsonian, 2 Jan. 2017
  • Over the course of his career, his use of fractal patterns increased, and seeking out these spirals has even been used to root out fake paintings.
    Erin Blakemore, Smithsonian, 2 Jan. 2017
  • All link macrocosm to microcosm, unit to pattern to fractal.
    Cate McQuaid, BostonGlobe.com, 9 May 2023
  • There were ivory fractals of dead lichen, like intricate coral, and miniature hills and valleys of sphagnum moss in every shade.
    Henry Wismayer, New York Times, 16 Nov. 2016
  • The segment lost me when everything started getting echo-y and fractal.
    Bethy Squires, Vulture, 20 Aug. 2021
  • The news, like a fractal, repeats this betrayal of good intentions on every scale.
    Greg Jackson, Harper's magazine, 6 Jan. 2020
  • But on Thursday the endless kaleidoscope fractals mostly felt like a busy albatross around the score’s neck.
    Zachary Woolfe, New York Times, 17 Feb. 2023
  • The resulting images of the simulations show islands of dark or light for atoms with spin up or down, water or ice, the edges of their shapes jagged and fractal in nature.
    Meredith Fore, WIRED, 5 July 2019
  • The equations could predict an ice cube shape resembling a fractal, which has never been observed in nature.
    Manon Bischoff, Scientific American, 23 Mar. 2023
  • This rough, fragmented pattern, known as a fractal, creates an effective means of sampling a large space.
    Carl Zimmer, Discover Magazine, 14 Sep. 2011
  • In this view, existence spreads out like a fractal drawing, and there are countless nooks in which pocket universes can reside.
    Brian Resnick, Vox, 3 May 2018
  • But over the spring, as the news cycle unfurled fresh hell by the minute like a fractal of horrors, I was forced to accept that every two or three functional days would be followed by a day of recovery.
    Karla L. Miller, Washington Post, 13 Oct. 2020
  • The animal forages along a complex mathematical pattern called a Lévy flight, a type of fractal.
    Stephen Ornes, Discover Magazine, 15 Dec. 2010
  • Babies can be mommies to their dolls, and women can be dolls in movies, which makes the director into the mommy, and so on—it’s an infinite fractal of relationality, of care.
    Jo Livingstone, The New Republic, 7 Jan. 2022
  • Stories spiral out of stories in Meloy’s fiction, like fractals endlessly elaborating to fill all the available space.
    Laura Miller, Slate Magazine, 13 June 2017
  • Animal faces and eyes flash towards the audience, intermixed with galaxies and natural occurring patterns like the spiral fractal of a shell or the eye of a storm, to show the connectedness of all things.
    Valerie Lee, Billboard, 4 Dec. 2019
  • Instead, North America’s west coast appears to have been a complex fractal of microenvironments, including some ice-free zones along the mainland, and even more on offshore islands, which were outside the ice sheet’s reach.
    Ross Andersen, The Atlantic, 7 Sep. 2021
  • When seen from thousands of feet in the air, solar installations and wind turbines become abstract works of art: a glinting fractal of metallic petals circle a single pale stamen, and sharp, slender flowers tower above the earth.
    Rachel Brown, National Geographic, 23 Mar. 2017
  • Just south of downtown at Believe Music Hall, lasers scatter into fractals and reflect off stained glass windows as bass reverberates from the vaulted cathedral ceiling.
    Katey Ceccarelli, Billboard, 29 Oct. 2019
  • Other examples of nature’s fractals include clouds, rivers, coastlines and mountains.
    Richard Taylor, Smithsonian, 31 Mar. 2017
  • Other examples of nature’s fractals include clouds, rivers, coastlines and mountains.
    Richard Taylor, Smithsonian, 31 Mar. 2017
  • Most automated terrain generators used to create virtual worlds are based on a technique called fractal noise, a standard 3D graphics approach that’s been around since the 60s, O’Leary says.
    Courtesy Martin O'Leary, National Geographic, 16 Aug. 2016
  • Ostensibly simple abstractions—a square canvas inscribed with a large circle, black and gold pieces ridged like licorice, three huge panels made of nothing but shimmery blue—are like fractals, too replete with detail for the eye to capture them all.
    The New Yorker, 31 Mar. 2017
  • The Universe is a fractal running on a math equation that loops endlessly in on itself, a masterpiece of geometric patterns with no beginning and no end, and in this realization there is great freedom.
    Kat Bein, Billboard, 31 May 2017
  • Enlightenment is a distant shore for me but these moments are undeniably fractals of a larger mosaic.
    Elizabeth Greenwood, Longreads, 31 Jan. 2018
  • Some researchers have been arguing that quark-gluon plasma has these two properties and that fractal theory could offer insights into how the plasma behaves.
    Clara Moskowitz, Scientific American, 14 Feb. 2023

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

Last Updated: