How to Use irretrievable in a Sentence

irretrievable

adjective
  • The data was irretrievable after the computer crashed.
  • That irretrievable three hours was probably not a good use of my time.
    — Mark Settle, Forbes, 12 Apr. 2022
  • Nadal hit the ball at his feet, but Thiem managed a half-volley that turned into an irretrievable drop shot.
    — New York Times, 11 May 2018
  • This meant the dose — which cost the hospital an irretrievable $500 — had decayed and was now useless.
    — Sarah Varney, Washington Post, 16 Jan. 2018
  • Given enough machinery and labor, roads were not irretrievable after all.
    — Ben Goldfarb, Smithsonian Magazine, 13 Feb. 2024
  • The genre seems not just out of fashion, but outdated, a relic of the irretrievable American past.
    — Michael Auslin, National Review, 3 Aug. 2017
  • For Bodie, much of the past is as tantalizing and irretrievable as the meaning of private jokes in an old yearbook.
    — Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 20 Feb. 2023
  • For Isaac, the film also captures something irretrievable.
    — Georg Szalai, HollywoodReporter, 18 Mar. 2026
  • The drawings, beautiful and grim in equal measure, open up an emotional chasm of imminent and irretrievable loss.
    — Christopher Knight, latimes.com, 3 Aug. 2017
  • And the only irretrievable loss of time has been due to our homeland’s irretrievable lapse into exhaustion.
    — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, WSJ, 1 Oct. 2020
  • Until then, the damage to the New York business community and to the rule of law is irretrievable.
    — Peter Charalambous, ABC News, 20 Mar. 2024
  • In Suzume, there are many kinds of mourning, tied to the many kinds of irretrievable, often intertwined loss — of a person, a time, a tradition, a home.
    — Kayti Burt, Rolling Stone, 15 Apr. 2023
  • Before the gore begins (and even mid-action), West seems to truly consider the pain of irretrievable youth, and feel for those whose final years are consumed by it.
    — John Defore, The Hollywood Reporter, 14 Mar. 2022
  • That purposeful spilling, and the fact that something spilled cannot be unspilled, denotes for Calasso the irretrievable nature of time’s arrow and time’s wound.
    — New York Times, 28 Apr. 2020
  • Some of the losses incurred in my youth—most particularly, the lifelong repercussions of my time with Salinger—are irretrievable.
    — Joyce Maynard, Vogue, 13 Sep. 2018
  • Untold tonnes end up as irretrievable ocean flotsam, which sunlight and salt fragment into microscopic pieces that attract toxins and may be gulped by creatures that become seafood.
    — The Economist, 1 Mar. 2018
  • No fault did not require blame allowing a divorce if one spouse claimed irreconcilable differences or irretrievable breakdown against the other.
    — Patricia Fersch, Forbes.com, 9 Apr. 2025
  • The book touches on the terror of the Nazi years and the repression of imposed by communism, all filtered through a sense of longing for a sensuous and irretrievable past.
    — Washington Post, 8 Sep. 2021
  • Many families, including some of Peter’s relatives, found ways to channel their grief to salvage something from their irretrievable loss.
    — Amy Qin, New York Times, 11 Feb. 2024
  • Posner toys with plot points and character names, but the basic storyline is the same and the essential Chekhovian angst over squandered potential and irretrievable loss is preserved.
    — Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times, 24 Oct. 2023
  • Then, over the centuries (and especially in the 20th), nostalgia became less about longing for homeland and more about longing for home-time — for something static and irretrievable.
    — Washington Post, 28 Dec. 2021
  • Lawmakers warn that evidence critical to future war crimes investigations may be irretrievable.
    — Josh Hammer, Newsweek, 20 Mar. 2025
  • The concrete did irretrievable damage and in 1981, it was removed and replaced with a large pole and cable system, which remain today, holding up the remaining leaders.
    — Kate Bennett, CNN, 26 Dec. 2017
  • Once deleted, users can also manually empty the trash folder, making those files and communications irretrievable and truly deleted from the online platform.
    — Lars Daniel, Forbes, 26 Sep. 2024
  • For a moment, Zolciak and Biermann’s relationship looked irretrievable.
    — Kelly Wynne, Peoplemag, 13 July 2023
  • The state, alone and by itself, is powerless to stop an ineligible individual from casting an irretrievable ballot even if election officials know with certainty that the person is a felon or a non-citizen.
    — Andy Cilek, Twin Cities, 28 Apr. 2017
  • Going into Comic-Con, Marvel really did need to reaffirm its swagger, to prove 2023 was a momentary ebb rather than the start of an irretrievable decline.
    — Adam B. Vary, Variety, 28 July 2024
  • With the murder weapon irretrievable and DNA evidence unavailable, prosecutors will be forced to rely on witnesses that, for the most part, come with extensive personal baggage.
    — Christian Boone, ajc, 20 June 2018
  • While the losses are irretrievable and emotional wounds still sting, Lee said Asian and Black Angelenos have achieved a remarkable amount of healing and community-building in the intervening years.
    — NBC News, 28 Apr. 2022
  • This dreamscape of the island, like that of the jungle, illuminates in children’s literature a sense of utopia and longing about childhood as a not-quite-place, situated in an irretrievable past-yet-future, while at the same time rooted in an anti-utopian logic of adulthood.
    — Literary Hub, 17 Nov. 2025

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