How to Use recursive in a Sentence

recursive

adjective
  • Part of the problem was the recursive quality of his work.
    Cal Newport, The New Yorker, 17 Nov. 2020
  • Hell is being trapped in a recursive loop of Mail stories.
    Ed Yong, Discover Magazine, 25 Dec. 2010
  • That is a mind-bending form of recursive thinking, for sure.
    Lance Eliot, Forbes, 1 June 2022
  • The far-right Twitter bubble, in all its recursive fury, is partly to blame.
    WIRED, 17 Nov. 2022
  • The most thrilling thing about An Homage to Hollis Benton is its recursive nature.
    Andrea Alonso, Los Angeles Magazine, 12 June 2018
  • The target then decrypts the query, produces a response by sending the query to a recursive resolver such as 1.1.1.1, and then encrypts the response to the client.
    Dan Goodin, Ars Technica, 8 Dec. 2020
  • Such trippy, recursive games were a staple of trompe l’oeil.
    Susan Tallman, The New York Review of Books, 29 Dec. 2022
  • For one thing, the technique uses a recursive structure that breaks the task down into smaller chunks.
    Madison Goldberg, Quanta Magazine, 14 Dec. 2023
  • For one thing, the technique uses a recursive structure that breaks the task down into smaller chunks.
    Madison Goldberg, WIRED, 11 Feb. 2024
  • There is something bleakly recursive in watching as these stories are sold, and sold, and sold again.
    Molly Fischer, The New Yorker, 13 June 2022
  • Consider the recursive structure of fern fronds, or a coastline from above.
    New York Times, 6 Mar. 2021
  • As a result, the kernel got stuck in a recursive loop until the system finally crashed.
    Dan Goodin, Ars Technica, 11 Nov. 2019
  • His recursive vocal tics seem to mirror the roundabout symmetry of the viral dances featured in his videos.
    Will Dukes, Rolling Stone, 11 Apr. 2022
  • The birds produced the recursive sequences in around 40 percent of trials—but without the extra training that the monkeys required.
    Diana Kwon, Scientific American, 2 Nov. 2022
  • Use your mouse to lift any one of those new shapes, then move it onto another grid for the sake of a recursive formula application.
    Sam MacHkovech, Ars Technica, 22 Apr. 2022
  • Over the course of a summer, Jackson spends untold hours with Sharpton, and unspools those hours in a recursive series of vignettes, each one taking the measure of the man in a new and surprising way.
    Longreads, 23 Feb. 2024
  • One of the animals generated recursive sequences in around half of the trials.
    Diana Kwon, Scientific American, 2 Nov. 2022
  • But that would still leave us at a plateau; there would be no recursive self-improvement and no intelligence explosion.
    Ted Chiang, The New Yorker, 30 Mar. 2021
  • And there’s a bunch of ideas and techniques that have been proposed over the years: recursive reward modeling, debate, task decomposition, and so on.
    IEEE Spectrum, 31 Aug. 2023
  • After a recursive series of such steps, two sets of channels emerge, one set being extremely noisy, the other being almost noise-free.
    Steven Levy, Wired, 16 Nov. 2020
  • Lately Apple is trying to throw itself down a recursive rabbit-hole.
    Charlie Sorrel, WIRED, 18 June 2010
  • Kavan offers up a recursive system, an index of reaction points as unsettling and neatly tailored as a sheaf of Rorschach blots.
    New York Times, 27 Oct. 2017
  • This is how recursive self-improvement takes place—not at the level of individuals but at the level of human civilization as a whole.
    Ted Chiang, The New Yorker, 30 Mar. 2021
  • To piece together the insistent, almost recursive, voiceover that ebbs in and out of frame, is to witness someone trying desperately to speak to a parent who has probably not been up to the task of raising a child.
    Manuel Betancourt, Variety, 11 Nov. 2021
  • His latest book, the hybrid lyric/photo essay Blind Spot, is possibly the most stunning instance of Cole’s recursive tendencies.
    Ismail Muhammad, Slate Magazine, 15 June 2017
  • The team behind Zcash discovered a recursive method to verify private transactions at scale.
    Matthew De Silva, Quartz, 19 Sep. 2019
  • The script's backdoor code, as Wardle noted, is a recursive Python command-line call with a hard-coded IP address for the connection that uses port 1337—an obvious leetspeak joke.
    Sean Gallagher, Ars Technica, 3 July 2018
  • The motifs—cascading green code, simulation theory, white rabbits—remain the same, a recursive loop that, while not new, plays a familiar melody.
    Angela Watercutter, Wired, 22 Dec. 2021
  • Intertwined with that slow-moving, recursive narrative are sections that skip and leap across the dynamic history of his family and his tribe.
    The Washington Post, OregonLive.com, 30 July 2017
  • These attractors look different for different systems, but often take the form of recursive, fractal shapes.
    Sarah Wells, Popular Mechanics, 22 Sep. 2022

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

Last Updated: