How to Use COBOL in a Sentence
COBOL
noun-
Think batch files, COBOL and settlement windows that still measure in hours or even days.
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Bill Capuzzi,
Forbes.com,
22 Aug. 2025
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Many of the world’s largest banks still run mission-critical workloads on mainframes written in COBOL or Fortran.
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Adam Mills,
MSNBC Newsweek,
5 Dec. 2025
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In those days, technical survival depended on a near-photographic memory of COBOL syntax and JCL parameters.
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Shammy Narayanan,
Forbes.com,
26 May 2026
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Some 43% of core banking systems and 95% of ATM transactions still run on COBOL, a program that predates the year the Beatles got together.
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Bhaskar Chakravorti,
Fortune,
7 June 2026
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Most core enterprise systems—especially in banking and healthcare—speak SOAP, COBOL or proprietary SQL.
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Amit Gandhi,
Forbes.com,
20 Feb. 2026
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American institutions are in many ways still adapting to the internet—the IRS still processes tax returns using COBOL, a programming language that was released in 1960.
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Matteo Wong,
The Atlantic,
3 Apr. 2026
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These legacy platforms, often built in RPG, COBOL or proprietary mainframe environments, remain the beating heart of the financial services industry, processing millions of transactions daily.
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Andrey Kozyrskiy,
Forbes.com,
13 Feb. 2026
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The stock dropped 13% in a single day in February after artificial intelligence model builder Anthropic said AI could assist companies with modernizing code written in the COBOL programming language.
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Jordan Novet,
CNBC,
22 Apr. 2026
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Short for Common Business-Oriented Language, COBOL is a dominant code system developed in the late 1950s often used in business data processing, such as payment processing and retail transaction systems.
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Pia Singh,
CNBC,
23 Feb. 2026
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'COBOL.' 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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