How to Use order of magnitude in a Sentence

order of magnitude

noun phrase
  • And not by a little, either — by an order of magnitude.
    Jon Wilner, The Mercury News, 23 Feb. 2024
  • These figures are in the same order of magnitude as those of males at the same period: 4.9 ng/ml in adults and 3.9 ng/ml in juveniles.
    Alejandra Manjarrez, Discover Magazine, 28 July 2023
  • The United States may be well ahead of its nearest competitors, but the top three global economies are an order of magnitude ahead of all the others.
    Joshua Shifrinson, Foreign Affairs, 17 Oct. 2023
  • His head seemed an order of magnitude larger than his body, and his brown hair was both thinning and receding.
    Kent Russell, Harper's Magazine, 11 May 2022
  • The West’s technology and resources and Ukraine’s drive to win are both still larger than Russia’s by an order of magnitude.
    Andriy Zagorodnyuk, Foreign Affairs, 17 Jan. 2024
  • The sales of seemingly every item — appliances, cars and so on — were an order of magnitude higher than before the war.
    Nate Cohn, New York Times, 4 Jan. 2024
  • Go up another order of magnitude, and the LLM can now perform tasks that require four skills at once, again with the same level of competency.
    Quanta Magazine, 22 Jan. 2024
  • This new bound is sensitive to energies above roughly 1013 electron-volts — more than an order of magnitude beyond what the LHC can currently test.
    Zack Savitsky, Quanta Magazine, 10 Apr. 2023
  • Testing also found that cluster munitions were more than an order of magnitude more likely to inflict direct hits on the thin top armor of vehicles.
    Sébastien Roblin, Popular Mechanics, 7 July 2023
  • To be sure, there has been progress in the nation’s program of energy distribution: Ethiopia’s electrification has increased by an order of magnitude since 2000.
    IEEE Spectrum, 9 Mar. 2022
  • This scale conveys magnitude on a base-10 logarithmic scale, which is a fancy way of saying that each order of magnitude represents a 10-times increase in intensity from the last one.
    Sven Karabegovic, The Salt Lake Tribune, 5 Sep. 2023
  • Last week, new simulations from two groups reported that a rising class of quantum error-correcting codes is more efficient by an order of magnitude than the current gold standard, known as the surface code.
    Charlie Wood, Quanta Magazine, 25 Aug. 2023
  • The size of models used for tasks like computer vision, natural language processing, and speech processing has increased by 15 times in just two years, an order of magnitude higher than the increase in computer power in chips over the same period.
    Rakesh Kumar, Fortune, 13 June 2023
  • But since the 1990s, the overwhelming majority of those tampons have come cased in plastic, meaning plastic applicators outnumber plastic straws by an order of magnitude in the municipal waste stream.
    Sonja Sharp, Los Angeles Times, 3 Aug. 2023
  • The crystal in question, called a nanocomposite superlattice, leads to an order of magnitude improvement in the amount of power needed to write a bit, according to research reported last week in Nature Communications.
    IEEE Spectrum, 30 Jan. 2024
  • Ultimately, the same argument could help prop up the $24 trillion US Treasury market, which is an order of magnitude larger than any government bond market of similar creditworthiness.
    Hanna Ziady, CNN, 26 May 2023
  • This pairs a team’s ability to execute with an almost competitive product in a climate-effective technology bucket to understand the order of magnitude that your multiple can achieve.
    Stephen Armstrong, WIRED, 13 Feb. 2024
  • During Indonesia’s 2015 fires, Borneo’s air had particulate matter concentrations nearly an order of magnitude higher than the levels in these studies.
    Wendy M. Erb, Fortune Well, 25 June 2023
  • With each new order of magnitude, unexpected capabilities emerge.
    Ian Bremmer and Mustafa Suleyman, Foreign Affairs, 16 Aug. 2023

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