How to Use sortie in a Sentence

sortie

noun
  • Eleven of the sorties crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait.
    Andrea Vacchiano, Fox News, 27 Jan. 2024
  • Too often on his sorties, though, his stomach would start to knot.
    The Economist, 31 Aug. 2017
  • To recreate the sortie over the Ruhr, the Lancasters had to fly far lower even than on the actual raid.
    Adam Bernstein, BostonGlobe.com, 30 Apr. 2018
  • Artemis seeks to go to the Moon with a sense of permanence rather than flying a half-dozen sorties down to the lunar surface.
    Eric Berger, Ars Technica, 3 Apr. 2023
  • Landry flew thirty sorties in a B-17 bomber and survived a crash landing.
    Rich Cohen, Harper's magazine, 19 Aug. 2019
  • To re-create the sortie over the Ruhr, the Lancasters had to fly far lower even than on the actual raid.
    Adam Bernstein, Washington Post, 30 Apr. 2018
  • In June, China’s airforce sent 28 planes close to Taiwan in what was then the biggest sortie this year.
    Jacob Gu, Bloomberg.com, 2 Oct. 2021
  • Cash and Olive hopped on, too, after Cash made a second sortie for hot chocolate.
    Christopher Keyes, Outside Online, 22 June 2020
  • All the Israeli jets in those sorties returned home safely.
    Aron Heller, Time, 10 Feb. 2018
  • The sortie included eight fighter jets and four bombers.
    Anders Hagstrom, Fox News, 3 Nov. 2022
  • The high sortie rate has been a problem for the Japanese air force’s F-15J squadrons, which are first in line to enforce Japan’s air-defense zones.
    David Axe, Forbes, 5 Mar. 2021
  • Currently, the wings fly 30-60 sorties per day from Hill’s flightline.
    Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, 7 Jan. 2020
  • On Smith’s last tour, the Vinson’s aviators flew 8,499 sorties.
    Carl Prine, sandiegouniontribune.com, 21 Oct. 2017
  • Russia got better at tracking and shooting down the TB2s, and Ukraine started pulling them from risky sorties.
    Peter Weber, The Week, 6 Feb. 2023
  • Once rare and exotic, sorties like this have become routine in just two years’ time.
    Christopher Mims, WSJ, 30 Mar. 2019
  • But for most strikes, that would require the carriers launching F-35C sorties to be much closer to the coast than falls within the comfort zone.
    Sean Gallagher, Ars Technica, 22 May 2018
  • The sorties risk a broader confrontation with Moscow, which launched a campaign of airstrikes in 2015 that tipped the war in Mr. Assad’s favor.
    Jared Malsin, WSJ, 3 Mar. 2020
  • In the following days, Japanese sorties rained ordnance on the port.
    Peter Eisner, Smithsonian, 22 Aug. 2017
  • In the following days, Japanese sorties rained ordnance on the port.
    Peter Eisner, Smithsonian, 29 Sep. 2017
  • In the first phase of her opposed sortie, the Nautilus evaded three submarines hoping to cut her trail with their sonar listening gear.
    sandiegouniontribune.com, 13 May 2018
  • Russian forces are dug in and protected by mines, artillery and endless drone sorties.
    Alex Horton, Washington Post, 12 Oct. 2023
  • The compound has two entrances and two exits to carry out raiding sorties or fetch water.
    Joe Grimm, Detroit Free Press, 15 July 2017
  • Instead of simply working onboard the Gateway in the emptiness of space, a part of the Orion’s crew can board the lander and make a sortie onto the lunar surface.
    Anatoly Zak, Popular Mechanics, 23 Oct. 2018
  • The planes flew again in Operation Iraqi Freedom and in Afghanistan, flying 32 percent of the combat sorties in both theaters.
    Eric Tegler, Popular Mechanics, 19 Nov. 2016
  • Depending on the size of the munitions, a B-2 could drop a pair of bunker busters during a sortie or let loose more than 150 smaller bombs all able to hit separate bull’s-eyes.
    Scott Canon, kansascity, 10 Aug. 2017
  • The cutting edge of the civil rights movement was game-planning military sorties as much as marches.
    New York Times, 19 Sep. 2019
  • Those other dudes have all stoked my (re)imagination in recent years, but Mav hasn't put an arm around me since his triumph in that dubious sortie over the Indian Ocean back in 1986.
    Nate Davis, USA TODAY, 26 May 2022
  • The sole business case metric that has remained unchanged over time is the Navy’s hoped-for 30% increase in sortie generation rates.
    Craig Hooper, Forbes, 29 Nov. 2023
  • Carrier planes flew 41% of America’s combat sorties in the Korean war and more than half of its raids on North Vietnam.
    The Economist, 14 Nov. 2019
  • South Korea's flight of 30 warplanes did not engage the sortie, however, and only guarded the country's airspace.
    Anders Hagstrom, Fox News, 6 Oct. 2022

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