How to Use terminator in a Sentence

terminator

noun
  • Gaze along the terminator — the line that divides the lit from unlit portions — for your best views.
    Arnold Pearlstein, sun-sentinel.com, 4 Aug. 2019
  • For all the handshakes and hugs this weekend, Betts was a cold-blooded terminator between the lines.
    Peter Abraham, BostonGlobe.com, 27 Aug. 2023
  • At this point, the Earth's terminator — the fuzzy edge between day and night — is located roughly through the mid-section of the lower 48 states.
    Tom Yulsman, Discover Magazine, 23 Apr. 2017
  • Young John and the new terminator break Sarah Connor out of the mental hospital.
    Eliana Dockterman, Time, 1 Nov. 2019
  • The first set of HIV drugs were nucleic acid inhibitors, known as chain terminator drugs.
    William A. Haseltine, Scientific American, 1 Oct. 2020
  • Leaving the Moon, Apollo 8 got this incredible view of the Moon’s terminator, the line where lunar day fades to night.
    Amy Shira Teitel, Discover Magazine, 24 Dec. 2018
  • The oblong pit near the terminator might be a degraded impact crater, NASA says.
    Eric Berger, Ars Technica, 29 Sep. 2022
  • Terminator is a time-travel franchise that throws in AI and the apocalypse.
    Charlie Jane Anders, WIRED, 19 May 2017
  • Most observers prefer to study the moon when the line between light and dark (called the terminator) is visible, because the deep shadows there make crater rims and walls on the line pop in relief.
    Nicole Clausing, Sunset Magazine, 24 Sep. 2020
  • The terminator quickly returns on the right, bringing nighttime with it.
    Tom Yulsman, Discover Magazine, 23 Apr. 2017
  • If may even have been possible to see sliver of frost on the M0on’s terminator—the divider between sunlight and darkness (so, day and night) —though no humans were around at the time.
    Jamie Carter, Forbes, 21 May 2022
  • Orbiting roughly along Earth’s terminator – the line between day and night – the satellites will spread out around the globe and stare continuously toward the sun.
    Korey Haynes, Discover Magazine, 21 June 2019
  • That’s because on the equinoxes, the daylight terminator — the shadow separating day and night across Earth — runs parallel to Earth’s lines of longitude.
    Justin Grieser, Washington Post, 22 Sep. 2017
  • This has provoked intense debate over whether these bodies can host life since liquid water would exist only in a narrow band along the terminator.
    The Physics Arxiv Blog, Discover Magazine, 14 Feb. 2023
  • Terminator was running, but a key gag, where the Terminator rides into the theater on a motorcycle was not working.
    Mark Eades, Orange County Register, 22 Mar. 2017
  • In addition, this visualization shows the moon's orbit position, sub-Earth and subsolar points, distance from the Earth at true scale, and labels of craters near the terminator.
    David Caraccio, sacbee, 29 Jan. 2018
  • The terminator doesn’t perfectly divide the planet into dark and light; Earth’s atmosphere bends sunlight by 37 miles (60 kilometers), which equals half a degree.
    National Geographic, 19 Mar. 2019
  • For now Tan's team is working on programming cyborg bacteria to deliver vaccines and act as tiny terminators for cancer cells.
    Elise Cutts, Scientific American, 17 Apr. 2023
  • What matters is that well into the second decade of our forever war, the combat movies that populate our multiplexes and our minds are devoted to a martial narrative of men-as-terminators that should have been strangled at its birth a long time ago.
    David French, National Review, 29 Jan. 2018
  • Underwood possessed a terminator-like focus during that time.
    Murphy Wheeler, The Indianapolis Star, 16 June 2020
  • Scientists get as excited as anyone about seeing new pictures of the mysterious worlds that populate our vast Solar System—from Mercury's day-and-night terminator to Pluto's icy mountains.
    Eric Berger, Ars Technica, 4 July 2017
  • Hollywood special effects artists have used the machines to capture realistic images of actors then create molten metal terminators onscreen.
    Wired Staff, WIRED, 1 Aug. 1996

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

Last Updated: