How to Use vestigial in a Sentence
vestigial
adjective-
Well, no one in the vestigial rear seats will be having a good time.
—Tony Quiroga, Car and Driver, 8 Feb. 2021
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The adults have vestigial mouthparts and cannot feed, and only live about a couple of weeks.
—Miri Talabac, Baltimore Sun, 6 Apr. 2023
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The daffy has hot-dog roots but enough vestigial cred to induce a new-schooler to tip his trucker hat.
—Nick Paumgarten, Outside Online, 11 July 2018
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The events in Essos could feel like a vestigial tail even in the show's best years, and Pentos lacks the texture of Winterfell.
—Darren Franich, EW.com, 17 Apr. 2021
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The king cab rear seat might best be described as vestigial, as if something larger used to be there.
—Mark Phelan, Detroit Free Press, 11 Aug. 2021
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Adults have vestigial mouth parts and cannot feed, so flowers won’t attract them.
—Miri Talabac, Baltimore Sun, 18 July 2023
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And then society moves on, and certain things start to feel vestigial.
—New York Times, 3 May 2018
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On the shin is a mini extension that curves upward like a thorny vestigial tail.
—Liana Satenstein, Vogue, 24 Oct. 2018
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Abelisaurids have stocky hind limbs, and like a Tyrannosaurus Rex, have stubby, vestigial forelimbs.
—Elizabeth Gamillo, Smithsonian Magazine, 15 June 2022
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By the time he was extradited, Guzman was a vestigial bone on the body narco—no longer necessary, in the way.
—Jack Holmes, Esquire, 15 Feb. 2017
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Their siren-like cry — a harsh rising note that chills the vestigial part of the mammalian brain that remembers living in burrows — echoed off the stone buildings.
—Los Angeles Times, 5 Apr. 2022
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The researchers also picked up a shortarse feelerfish, which has short, spindly fins and small vestigial eyes.
—Megan Gannon, Washington Post, 24 Feb. 2018
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Later, the attacking cells were shown to come from the thymus, a small, spongy organ, then thought to be vestigial, that straddled the esophagus.
—Dhruv Khullar, The New Yorker, 11 Aug. 2021
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But the sidewinding rattlesnake, which comes from a different branch of the viper family tree, still has a few vestigial belly spikes as well as pits.
—New York Times, 1 Feb. 2021
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All three theropods had beaks but with vestigial, or functionless, tooth sockets.
—Nicholas St. Fleur, New York Times, 26 Sep. 2017
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Less promoted but nonetheless implicit was the end of a way of a life, albeit a vestigial one.
—Los Angeles Times, 16 Aug. 2019
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Turn the vestigial key nub to the left of the steering wheel, and the GTS coupe settles into a deep rumble that transitions to a tempered growl in casual driving.
—Mike Sutton, Car and Driver, 30 June 2020
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And the TWA Hotel still conveys that dormant, vestigial longing for better things.
—Philip Kennicott, Washington Post, 12 June 2019
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Many of us learned in school that this tiny, fingerlike projection off the colon is a useless, vestigial remnant of our evolution, much like the puny leg bones found in some snakes.
—Claudia Wallis, Scientific American, 1 Mar. 2019
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The vestigial hips on my whale point back to her evolutionary ancestors.
—Peter Wayne Moe, Longreads, 25 Feb. 2022
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Look up at the rear view mirror and the view rearward is roughly comparable to looking through a mail slot but with rear headrests blocking even much of that vestigial view.
—Sam Abuelsamid, Forbes, 17 Apr. 2023
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Even the showy grille and the vestigial spare-tire hump seem surprisingly appropriate.
—Csaba Csere, Car and Driver, 9 Feb. 2023
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So are any human body parts truly useless or vestigial?
—Claudia Wallis, Scientific American, 1 Mar. 2019
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But compared to its carbon-intensive forebears, like the i3 and i8 hybrid, the iX’s carbon-y bits seem almost vestigial.
—Dan Neil, WSJ, 1 Oct. 2021
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Oftentimes, those collections can feel a bit vestigial—like a way for designers to just make a quick buck by churning out the same stuff in extra fabric, and not much more.
—Sam Schube, GQ, 15 June 2018
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Lambert says that these tiny limbs had no real function—also known as vestigial organs.
—Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 15 May 2017
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Tip of the cap While extra lives have been a vestigial concept in Mario games for years, Odyssey cements its distinctiveness in the series by doing away with the 1-up mushroom entirely.
—Kyle Orland, Ars Technica, 26 Oct. 2017
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And rear hatches become vestigial doors that lead to the secondary bulletproof rear bulkhead inside.
—Ezra Dyer, Car and Driver, 6 Oct. 2020
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The view forward is dominated by a large speedometer with a central LCD panel on the left and a smaller almost vestigial pod, which would normally be a tachometer, on the right.
—Bill Roberson, Forbes, 20 May 2021
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Couture may be the vestigial tail of fashion, but that is an entirely contemporary idea.
—Vanessa Friedman, New York Times, 4 July 2023
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'vestigial.' 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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