How to Use proliferate in a Sentence

proliferate

verb
  • Over the past 100 years, those flaws have proliferated as the use of the machine has spread across the world.
    — Amit Katwala, WIRED, 2 Mar. 2023
  • In these places, the plant proliferates and spreads fast.
    — Savanna Bous, Better Homes & Gardens, 6 Sep. 2023
  • As the cells grow and proliferate, the team changes the recipe of the liquid nutrients to boost growth.
    — Jenny Splitter / Photography Kelsey McClellan, Popular Mechanics, 20 Dec. 2019
  • Since the 1970s, dead zones have proliferated across the globe, and include one in the Baltic Sea three times the area of Maryland.
    — Arielle Paul, New York Times, 18 Nov. 2023
  • That was the first of many lies I was forced to carry for him, the weight of which proliferated my trauma.
    — Emanuella Grinberg, CNN, 27 Aug. 2019
  • Sure, Imgur helped memes and visual jokes proliferate across the web.
    — Chris Velazco, Washington Post, 16 May 2023
  • Over the course of hours, these cells might be able to proliferate to levels high enough to make someone sick.
    — Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 26 June 2019
  • Over the same period, charter schools in the city and across the state have proliferated.
    — Annie Waldman, ProPublica, 18 June 2019
  • But as the number of these housing projects has proliferated, so have the rules.
    — San Diego Union-Tribune, 1 Sep. 2019
  • This is not the first time the farms and ranches that now proliferate in the ancient lakebed have been threatened by the phantom lake’s reemergence.
    — Brennon Dixson, Los Angeles Times, 13 Apr. 2023
  • With mass numbers of sea stars dead, the urchins proliferated, chomping their way through the kelp forests.
    — Brigit Katz, Smithsonian, 26 Oct. 2019
  • As hate crimes proliferate, there’s a growing push to shine a light on bigotry.
    — Patrik Jonsson, The Christian Science Monitor, 23 Feb. 2022
  • A night at the Gilbert Inn stands in stark contrast to a stay in the chain hotels and vacation rentals that proliferate in Seaside.
    — oregonlive, 13 Feb. 2022
  • New research shows the zombies may proliferate in a warmer world.
    — Matt Simon, Wired, 19 May 2021
  • Remixes of the tune have proliferated, and, in the ultimate sign of normie crossover, even made it on the radio.
    — Ian Crouch, The New Yorker, 24 Nov. 2023
  • Just as home theaters proliferated, the smartphone started to bring television to the couch, or the chair, or the bed.
    — Ian Bogost, The Atlantic, 16 Jan. 2020
  • The ultimate hope is to remove enough purple urchins that the kelp can grow back in small patches and proliferate once again along the coast.
    — NBC News, 30 Nov. 2019
  • The hope was that the eruption’s output would simmer down, and the fissure would stop proliferating.
    — Robin George Andrews, Scientific American, 19 Dec. 2023
  • This has proliferated over the decades, because of the nature of the system itself.
    — Nathan Lewis, Forbes, 16 Oct. 2024
  • So, too, are the school-choice programs that have proliferated at the state level since Trump left office.
    — Matthew Continetti, National Review, 22 July 2023
  • Outlets that offer less healthy fare — such as fast-food joints, liquor stores and corner stores — tend to proliferate in those deserts.
    — Courtland Milloy, Washington Post, 17 May 2022
  • But the fact that the tool has already found a handful of infections at all speaks to how widely the use of spyware has proliferated around the world.
    — Lily Hay Newman, WIRED, 4 Dec. 2024
  • The modern-day trio was slowed by traffic jams at the shopping malls that now proliferate the historic highway.
    — David Kindy, Smithsonian Magazine, 15 Sep. 2021
  • In the time that resale options have been proliferating, so have new clothes.
    — Marc Bain, Quartzy, 16 Aug. 2019
  • Brought to Germany for their fur in the 1930s, raccoons have since proliferated across much of Europe.
    — Douglas Main, National Geographic, 29 July 2019
  • In the spring of 2018, a disease that has proliferated across some of southern Bangladesh struck this quiet corner of the country.
    — Peter Schwartzstein, National Geographic, 17 June 2019
  • In some of the more extreme hacks proliferating on YouTube videos, people have gone as far as setting the pouches on fire.
    — Sarah Krouse, WSJ, 20 Jan. 2020
  • Burmese pythons have since proliferated in the state’s muggy warmth.
    — Longreads, 25 Oct. 2024
  • Copycat books that appear to have been written by AI and are attached to real authors who didn't write them have proliferated on Amazon and other platforms in recent years.
    — Chloe Veltman, NPR, 28 June 2025
  • Conservative ETFs — and virtue-signaling funds of all political stripes — are proliferating in the Trump age.
    — semafor.com, 8 July 2025

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