How to Use whorl in a Sentence

whorl

noun
  • From the fish tanks come the Dungeness crabs and whorls of eel, the flesh fluffy and preening from the heat of the wok.
    Ligaya Mishan, New York Times, 21 Sep. 2017
  • Just cut the head, when harvesting, just above the bottom whorl of leaves.
    Washington Post, 14 Aug. 2019
  • What the researchers found were traces of cartilage around the jaw in the rock, remnants of the skull as well as the jaws that held the tooth whorl.
    Riley Black, Smithsonian Magazine, 2 Apr. 2021
  • These 2- to 3-foot whorls of stems and leaves, which dangle from tree branches, are like an Airbnb for the avian crowd.
    George Ball, WSJ, 21 Dec. 2017
  • After nine months, the pine had put out a new whorl of branches, and the trunk had grown, as had Ander’s courage.
    cleveland, 19 Nov. 2019
  • My infant son grabbed a branch now and then, and the dog slept under the last whorl of branches, near the lighted parts.
    Erin Kirkland, Anchorage Daily News, 19 Dec. 2017
  • The snail's shell has seven to nine whorls (spirals) when it is fully grown.
    USA TODAY, 1 July 2023
  • Rela adapted the design of baroque scotias on the posts of a park outside to fashion a large whorl over the front entrance.
    Elisabeth Malkin, ELLE Decor, 20 Feb. 2018
  • The other is a sinuous sheath of silk crepe topped with a huge cumulus whorl or wreath of ruched silk gazar.
    Laura Jacobs, WSJ, 9 Oct. 2018
  • The whorl of its translucent shell offers a safe haven for retreat when the mollusk is threatened by a predator.
    Discover Magazine, 17 Nov. 2016
  • Flowers are built from parts named sepals, petals, stamens, and carpels, which are arranged in whorls.
    Dhananjay Khadilkar, Ars Technica, 24 Feb. 2023
  • Of all President-elect Donald J. Trump’s rivals over the past year, the tiny narrow-mouthed whorl snail must be the smallest.
    Danny Hakim and Sinead O’Shea, New York Times, 7 Dec. 2016
  • But Wallace recognized the stone as an authentic Viking-era spindle whorl, a small stone that was fixed to the end of a rod used to spin thread.
    Sarah Durn, Smithsonian Magazine, 3 Mar. 2021
  • Medlar is a small tree whose single, large, white blossoms are cradled in a whorl of forest-green leaves.
    Washington Post, 5 Nov. 2019
  • One night, as outside winds stirred up dusty whorls of snow in the parking lot, whipped across the plains and over the treaty land where the camps had been, inside felt briefly desolate, too.
    Rebecca Bengal, Vogue, 21 Jan. 2019
  • Dupuy-Spencer has chosen an angle from which the soldier’s hands are still visible among the whorls of metal.
    Josephine Livingstone, New Republic, 15 Sep. 2017
  • Each of the tracts was brightly colored, and looping, twisting and crisscrossing like a whorl of spaghetti.
    Bijal P. Trivedi, Discover Magazine, 3 Aug. 2015
  • Plus, with whorls of rubbery leaves, certain euphorbias create a fun, funky shape.
    Karen Hugg, Washington Post, 19 Sep. 2023
  • But on the loops and whorls of a mountain road, the soft suspension substantially limits the A6's cornering speed.
    Fred M.h. Gregory, Car and Driver, 12 July 2023
  • Slender stems of Eurasian watermilfoil, bearing whorls of soft, feathery leaves, reach for the sky from the bed of Lake Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
    Johnny Simon, Quartz, 8 Sep. 2019
  • Over this time, Ren’s analysis shows, the whorls may have rotated ever so slightly, at about six tenths of a degree per year.
    Joshua Sokol, WIRED, 28 May 2018
  • Quickly stir in vanilla and spread over cooked rhubarb filling, shaping into pretty swoops and whorls.
    Anna Thomas Bates, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 23 May 2018
  • But there’s a catch: an animal must be the one responsible for the sculpture and can use nothing but its tongue to shape divots, swirls and whorls into the 50-pound square block.
    Jennifer Nalewicki, Smithsonian, 21 Aug. 2019
  • Through it all, no one found a better specimen that depicted where the whorl was located.
    Riley Black, Smithsonian Magazine, 2 Apr. 2021
  • For many volunteers, the service provided an outlet for a whorl of emotions that linger two decades later.
    Lauren Hernandez, Danielle Echeverria, San Francisco Chronicle, 11 Sep. 2021
  • With a face that baffled paleontologists for years, this creature had a lower jaw made up of a spiral of teeth, known as a tooth-whorl.
    Charlotte Stephenson, Discover Magazine, 18 June 2015
  • But while other phones such as the OnePlus 6T feature an optical sensor that uses light to read your fingerprint, the S10 uses sound waves to map the whorls and loops.
    Michael Simon, PCWorld, 20 Feb. 2019
  • These events are related, Marie soon learns, but the whorl of history proves to be a game of Clue in which both the crimes and culprits have become obscured by the passage of time and the lesions of memory.
    Jiayang Fan, New York Times, 11 Oct. 2016
  • But the overall shape of the fingerprint pattern—whether the fingerprint ends up as a whorl, a loop, or an arch—depends on the anatomy of the finger and the exact timing of ridge formation.
    Byclaire Asher, science.org, 9 Feb. 2023
  • Few studies on canine whorls have been reported and none have assessed whorl position or direction of flow.
    Ncbi Rofl, Discover Magazine, 6 June 2012

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