How to Use indeterminacy in a Sentence

indeterminacy

noun
  • There’s also a good-hearted indeterminacy at the show’s core that keeps the catty premise from gelling with its nobler themes.
    Lili Loofbourow, Washington Post, 20 Mar. 2024
  • That feeling of indeterminacy is, of course, the very allure of an alcoholic buzz.
    Mark Olsen Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times, 11 Dec. 2020
  • The worst part of the internment was its indeterminacy.
    Jonathan Blitzer, New Yorker, 8 Sep. 2025
  • This embrace of indeterminacy is what Kurdi most prizes in the graphic form.
    Olivia Giovetti, Harpers Magazine, 27 Jan. 2026
  • Still, the indeterminacy of their detention had become its own form of torture.
    Jonathan Blitzer, New Yorker, 13 July 2026
  • Undated ballots and the like are the new hanging chads, a source of indeterminacy, which is election poison.
    The Editorial Board, WSJ, 23 May 2022
  • But again, this indeterminacy also means that there are near-infinite bad algorithms, too.
    Joseph Franklin, Scientific American, 11 June 2018
  • To build a world in the fullest sense of the word requires an almost Buddha-like commitment to self-negation and indeterminacy.
    Jonathon Keats, Forbes, 8 June 2022
  • The indeterminacy of the paintings extends to Kurant’s practice as a whole.
    New York Times, 12 Nov. 2021
  • The first half of the concert focuses on indeterminacy and includes pieces that are loosely designed to achieve unknown results.
    Peter Margasak, Chicago Reader, 23 Feb. 2018
  • But this indeterminacy was the quality that made the story resonant.
    Jesse Barron, New York Times, 16 Nov. 2023
  • The convention of courtroom journalism is to make a scruple of indeterminacy.
    New York Times, 2 June 2022
  • The experiment took quantum indeterminacy to a whole new level.
    Quanta Magazine, 19 Jan. 2016
  • What John Cage calls indeterminacy.
    John Hopewell, Variety, 6 Jan. 2026
  • To make that happen, Viola needed faith in indeterminacy, which is at the heart of what made Tudor so fascinating.
    Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times, 16 July 2024
  • Fiocre more mysterious and suggesting the indeterminacy of the backstage world.
    Karen Wilkin, WSJ, 8 Sep. 2020
  • The dual and dueling narrators lend the events of the book a high level of indeterminacy that proves both mysterious and entertaining.
    Paul Di Filippo, Washington Post, 4 July 2022
  • One the one hand, Dorman explained, the concerto makes salient use of modern techniques, such as indeterminacy and disjointed tempi.
    Special To The Plain Dealer, cleveland.com, 16 Oct. 2017
  • Again the concept isn’t clear, but its indeterminacy offers a convenient vessel for pouring in propaganda about race and ethnicity.
    John O. McGinnis, WSJ, 15 July 2021
  • The team is now researching perceptions of aleatory uncertainty — unknowns about the future due to randomness, indeterminacy, chance or luck.
    New York Times, 4 Apr. 2020
  • These are pages intended to catch the shape of a writer’s thoughts—the tome remains more of a notebook than a series of persuasive essays, with all the indeterminacy and occasional solipsism that form entails.
    Katy Waldman, Slate Magazine, 13 Jan. 2017
  • Could the underlying cause of quantum indeterminacy be deterministic chaos at some much smaller subquantum scale?
    Quanta Magazine, 6 Feb. 2020
  • The whole point of us working in in collaboration is to look forward to these moments when this kind of indeterminacy happens, either because of a thunderstorm or the other person’s intervention.
    John Hopewell, Variety, 6 Jan. 2026
  • The ambitious finale rushes to address these indeterminacies, some more superficially than others.
    Terry Nguyen, Vulture, 26 May 2024
  • The concerto reveals, with marvel and magnificence, the essential nuance between the indeterminacy of nature’s rhythm and the chaos of our climate interference.
    Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times, 30 May 2023
  • As if straining to recoup the novel’s difficulty, Gyllenhaal cultivates indeterminacy—a form of faux-difficulty, too little mind instead of too much.
    Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 26 Jan. 2023
  • In short, the tendency for systems to move from low entropy to high entropy, the particular spacetime conditions of our solar system and the indeterminacy of the future combine to create our particular conception of time.
    Conor Feehly, Discover Magazine, 3 Nov. 2021
  • Like her, these characters are diffident, aimless, frustrated; they are stalled in their careers and ambivalent about their romantic partners, as if the acute experience of racial indeterminacy has diffused into something more banal.
    Vulture, 27 Sep. 2022
  • The effect is a paradoxical sense of both particularity and indeterminacy, exposure and concealment.
    Merve Emre, The New Yorker, 25 July 2022
  • Its radical indeterminacy, its abyss of unstable identities and unresolved mysteries, is at the heart of Lou’s bold political diagnostics.
    Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 21 Feb. 2023

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