How to Use overlie in a Sentence

overlie

verb
  • Any longer may damage your overlying skin and even give you frostbite.
    — Bruce Y. Lee, Forbes.com, 19 June 2026
  • The doctors overlay data from the vest with images from scans of the patient’s heart.
    — Gina Kolata, New York Times, 13 Dec. 2017
  • As a result, the top few inches of soil or rock heat up rapidly over the course of a day, and in turn warm the overlying air.
    — Ned Kleiner, Los Angeles Times, 17 Aug. 2024
  • There’s the overlying fear that every coach has that their players, too, will enter that portal.
    — Sam Blum, Dallas News, 7 Jan. 2020
  • The rich volcanic soil overlying the limestone has been fertile for centuries.
    — Chi Varnado, San Diego Union-Tribune, 19 Nov. 2024
  • This melts the overlying ice, creating a dark band of open water running around the equator.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 2 Mar. 2020
  • Other paintings overlay a cranium and its contents, whether bone, flesh or inner light.
    — Washington Post, 13 Sep. 2019
  • There was the signal, and there was their prediction of what the waveform from the merger of two black holes would look like overlying it.
    — Quanta Magazine, 18 Feb. 2016
  • That’s a very specific cause of cardiac arrest that occurs when there is blunt force trauma to the heart, or the chest wall that overlies the heart.
    — Corinne Purtill, Los Angeles Times, 25 July 2023
  • Heat waves create the perfect conditions for spotting crop marks, which form in fields that overlay ancient buildings, from the air.
    — Brigit Katz, Smithsonian, 11 July 2018
  • One Twitch feature lets gamers stream the official G League video feed, but overlay their own play-by-play.
    — Benny Evangelista, SFChronicle.com, 17 June 2018
  • In this case, there may be other demographic factors that overlay onto these results.
    — Philip Bump, Washington Post, 13 Dec. 2017
  • Water in crust, in minerals, and in any sediments along for the ride is released in to the mantle of the overlying plate.
    — Erik Klemetti, Discover Magazine, 13 July 2010
  • This month, the researchers will return to Waesche, looking for more rocks that could confirm whether the loss of overlying ice caused Waesche to wake up.
    — Bypaul Voosen, science.org, 3 Dec. 2024
  • The new bat fossil seemed to be smaller in size than the other two bat species found from similar, overlying levels in the lake limestone, and its bones seemed to be stouter.
    — Riley Black, Smithsonian Magazine, 12 Apr. 2023
  • The underlying geology imparts a signature on the overlying soils and then the plants that grow on those soils.
    — Jeanne Timmons, Ars Technica, 18 Jan. 2024
  • Researchers will also be able to download the map and overlay their data, according to Gizmodo.
    — Katherine J. Wu, Smithsonian Magazine, 27 Apr. 2020
  • Researchers have a good understanding of Antarctic subglacial lakes, which can fill and drain and cause overlying ice to flow quicker.
    — Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 27 June 2019
  • The results are somewhat ambiguous as to how much ice may lurk unseen beneath layers of overlying ice-sparse material.
    — K. R. Callaway, Scientific American, 18 Mar. 2026
  • This can be physical demanding labor because a lot of overlying rock often has to be removed before the bone layer is exposed.
    — Hans-Dieter Sues, Smithsonian, 3 Sep. 2019
  • The cameras pierced the artist’s overlying brushstrokes to reveal a sketch of an elegant and mysterious man wearing a bow tie and three rings and holding his chin.
    — Fabio Pacucci, Scientific American, 27 June 2024
  • So, subducting slab releases water as the slab goes down, this prompts melting in the overlying mantle and magmas rise into the overriding plate.
    — Erik Klemetti, Discover Magazine, 11 Oct. 2010
  • However, those sea surface temperatures will be far warmer than the overlying air temperatures.
    — Marshall Shepherd, Forbes.com, 29 Jan. 2026
  • Mongolia’s Gobi desert is the world’s richest fossil area, overlying vast lakes and rivers that were a prehistoric paradise for plant life and dinosaurs.
    — Richard Drew, National Geographic, 9 Sep. 2016
  • The bigger, overlying issue remains finding a transformative player to build around.
    — Manny Navarro, miamiherald, 29 June 2018
  • Recently Google examined brain waves to find new ways to evaluate user response to overlay ads in YouTube videos.
    — Adam Duvander, WIRED, 3 Nov. 2008
  • The freeways are the concrete net that overlies it all, but only real Angelenos enter their mesmerizing alpha state.
    — Patt Morrison, Los Angeles Times, 11 Apr. 2023
  • Normally, this recombination causes peaks in one half-beam’s waves to overlie troughs in the other’s, and vice versa, resulting in darkness.
    — The Economist, 22 Aug. 2019
  • But clever techniques can work around this limitation, including adaptive optics, which rapidly reshapes a mirror in the telescope to counter the motion of overlying air.
    — Phil Plait, Scientific American, 27 Nov. 2025
  • There's also evidence that Europa's ocean occasionally sends plumes of seawater erupting out into space through cracks in the overlying crust.
    — Lee Billings, Scientific American, 19 Apr. 2023

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