How to Use parabola in a Sentence

parabola

noun
  • The neighbor kids were biking up and down the street, looping in parabolas.
    Allegra Goodman, The New Yorker, 20 Feb. 2023
  • This is achieved by flying a larger arc over the top of a parabola.
    Stacey Leasca, Travel + Leisure, 19 Apr. 2023
  • The important thing is that this is the equation of a parabola.
    Rhett Allain, Wired, 13 Aug. 2021
  • Johnson held her follow through and backpedaled as the ball traveled its parabola path to the rim.
    Ben Baskin, SI.com, 31 Mar. 2018
  • Cut the resulting parabola out with a jigsaw to form the mouth of your bootjack.
    Teddy Boxberger, Popular Mechanics, 2 Aug. 2017
  • This would make the y-position vs. time graph a parabola instead of a straight line.
    Rhett Allain, Wired, 26 Nov. 2021
  • The problem is that the arc of a player’s career follows the same parabola as Curry’s shots.
    Ben Cohen, WSJ, 8 Oct. 2018
  • Haaland was not watching, either, as the ball reached the apex of its parabola and started to descend.
    Rory Smith, New York Times, 9 May 2023
  • This curve is similar to the Gaussian bell curve, or the downward parabola.
    Quanta Magazine, 13 Oct. 2016
  • Mike Moustakas flipped his bat to the ground and put his head down as another baseball soared through the sky, creating a parabola in the humid night air.
    Rustin Dodd, kansascity, 22 July 2017
  • The cast and crew of that movie, though, was able to reset and position for the next scene between the 30-second intervals of zero-g on each parabola.
    Robert Z. Pearlman, Ars Technica, 18 June 2020
  • Full weightlessness came on the fourth parabola, when everyone floated off the floor.
    Chelsey Lewis, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 16 July 2021
  • The jump arc follows a path similar to a parabola, which is a symmetrical curve that looks like an upside-down U.
    Allison Goldstein, Popular Mechanics, 4 Feb. 2022
  • Even the single, round headlight is a real glass parabola, rimmed in polished aluminum.
    Fortune, 27 June 2018
  • For the first parabola, Nosacek and the others experienced Martian gravity — about one-third that of Earth.
    Chelsey Lewis, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 16 July 2021
  • Pitts plans to return to Russia, and work to get monitors in the cockpit so the pilots can get even more real time feedback on how smoothly the parabolas are going.
    Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides, WIRED, 24 July 2008
  • When air resistance is very low, a projectile moves in the shape of a parabola—a type of mathematical curve.
    Science Buddies, Scientific American, 28 May 2015
  • But their childhoods, rather than mirror images, trace a kind of parabola: two archetypes of the African immigrant narrative.
    Taiye Selasi, New York Times, 8 May 2017
  • To brush up on algebra, a parabola is a particular type of arc that is defined by the exact curvature of its sides.
    Maya Wei-Haas, Smithsonian, 9 Feb. 2018
  • The host Pride were one minute away from the desperation sprint of stoppage time when Petersen collected a pass from Marta and launched the ball in a parabola from outside the box into the top corner of the netting.
    Julia Poe, orlandosentinel.com, 21 June 2021
  • Another big Airbus departed nearby Dammam, made a gentle parabola in the sky and touched down in Doha at 11:30 a.m.
    John Branch Tasneem Alsultan, New York Times, 26 Nov. 2022
  • There followed a dozen more parabolas, with Greg and Mollie floating, flipping, doing handstands, curling into balls and being tossed around the cabin.
    John Kelly, Washington Post, 22 Oct. 2019
  • Moreover, these two shapes are related: The tip of a very elongated ellipse is shaped almost exactly like a parabola.
    Max Tegmark, Discover Magazine, 3 Nov. 2013
  • The most important part of a parabola is the vertex — its highest or lowest point — and there are many mathematical techniques for finding it.
    Quanta Magazine, 23 Sep. 2021
  • How the new method works This alternate method for solving quadratic equations uses the fact that parabolas are symmetrical.
    Jonathan Corum, New York Times, 5 Feb. 2020
  • Quadratics and Parabolas 101 First, a quick review about quadratic equations and parabolas.
    Jonathan Corum, New York Times, 5 Feb. 2020
  • At the top of that parabola, additional steering rockets fired to flip the Orion to a proper descent orientation.
    Jeffrey Kluger, Time, 2 July 2019
  • But last week one of my students located the vertex of a parabola in a particularly elegant way.
    Quanta Magazine, 23 Sep. 2021
  • But what happened on his first parabola was unexpected.
    Washington Post, 28 Oct. 2021
  • The effect is something like watching little kids unsuccessfully trying to work two jump-ropes at once, resulting in wriggly, out-of-sync parabolas.
    Stephanie Zacharek, Time, 14 May 2018

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