How to Use fragmentary in a Sentence

fragmentary

adjective
  • That’s in part because there are two types of blackouts: fragmentary and en bloc.
    — Julia Belluz, Vox, 3 Oct. 2018
  • All that was left was a scattering of stones and fragmentary walls on a plateau with commanding views of the plain.
    — Joshua Hammer, Smithsonian Magazine, 15 May 2024
  • The new work focuses in on the bones, many of which are too fragmentary to be definitively assigned to a species.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 3 July 2024
  • When the author of this fragmentary memoir was at law school, a teen-age cousin had a psychotic break and killed a young boy.
    — The New Yorker, 24 Jan. 2022
  • Hard to know; records are fragmentary and conflated with myth.
    — William Meyers, WSJ, 14 Jan. 2019
  • But reports from the field are often fragmentary and there is much discretion in when to alert the trauma team.
    — Jenny Gold, Kaiser Health News and Sarah Kliff, Washington Post, 2 July 2018
  • But reports from the field are often fragmentary, and there is much discretion in when to alert the trauma team.
    — Jenny Gold, Vox, 20 July 2018
  • The upper jaw bones do not have the weak interface that the fragmentary first finds suggested.
    — Matthew A. Brown, Scientific American, 1 Jan. 2021
  • Most of these fossils are fragmentary, consisting of only a few bones or parts of bones.
    — Mrigakshi Dixit, Interesting Engineering, 6 Dec. 2024
  • The final chapters in the Amistad edition are fragmentary, and the book ends abruptly, ten years before Herod’s death.
    — Louis Menand, The New Yorker, 13 Jan. 2025
  • The stranger left behind little but the usual fragmentary chronicles of the poor and troubled.
    — Paul Greenberg, Arkansas Online, 22 Dec. 2020
  • Also missing is the wealth of fragmentary artifacts expected at a grave site, such as stone tools used to dig the pits.
    — Byann Gibbons, science.org, 5 June 2023
  • But many of these fossils are fragmentary and offer little detail on what this strange fish looked like.
    — Jack Tamisiea, New York Times, 30 Jan. 2024
  • The messages were fragmentary — a code name, a location, a password.
    — Jeffrey Gettleman, BostonGlobe.com, 26 Dec. 2022
  • The messages were fragmentary — a code name, a location, a password.
    — Jeffrey Gettleman, BostonGlobe.com, 26 Dec. 2022
  • The messages were fragmentary — a code name, a location, a password.
    — Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times, 25 Dec. 2022
  • The messages were fragmentary — a code name, a location, a password.
    — Jeffrey Gettleman, BostonGlobe.com, 26 Dec. 2022
  • The messages were fragmentary — a code name, a location, a password.
    — Jeffrey Gettleman, BostonGlobe.com, 26 Dec. 2022
  • As a consequence, fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.
    — Valerie Strauss, Washington Post, 15 Jan. 2018
  • Most of the large animals found from this area of the American West are fragmentary, which makes Zuul even more precious.
    — Gemma Tarlach, Discover Magazine, 10 May 2017
  • The scientists also found small bones that may have been young dinosaurs, but the researchers couldn’t determine the species of the eggs based on the fragmentary nature of the fossils.
    — Joshua Rapp Learn, Discover Magazine, 15 May 2024
  • Others said that the findings were in line with the fragmentary evidence that had been available until now.
    — James Glanz, New York Times, 23 Apr. 2020
  • The language isn’t eloquent but the image is, and the fragmentary form, like a single remembered line of verse, leaves a suggestive echo.
    — Max Norman, The New Yorker, 23 Nov. 2022
  • On overseas sites like Twitter and Facebook that are blocked in China, the response has been muted and fragmentary.
    — New York Times, 30 Nov. 2021
  • There is fragmentary evidence that the United States and its allies worked to counter some of the attacks and to prevent others from being launched.
    — New York Times, 19 Mar. 2022
  • But in many cases the boundaries are not exact, and the information is fragmentary.
    — Bill Turque, Washington Post, 27 June 2017
  • As humans age, sleep becomes lighter and more fragmentary, however, which in turn means that older adults get less deep sleep than younger ones.
    — Brigit Katz, Smithsonian, 10 Mar. 2017
  • Pol is not convinced that Razana is a notosuchian because the fossils found to date are so fragmentary.
    — Traci Watson, USA TODAY, 4 July 2017
  • The Israeli writer Ronit Matalon, who died in 2017 at the age of fifty-eight, was the author of fragmentary but sweeping family novels.
    — Ruth Margalit, The New York Review of Books, 5 Nov. 2020
  • And perhaps this decentering of the canon is inevitably a fragmentary and messy business.
    — Leslie Camhi, The New Yorker, 6 Dec. 2023

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