How to Use a priori in a Sentence

a priori

adjective
  • There's no a priori reason to think your expenses will remain the same in a new city.
  • The look of the films is something that can’t be determined a priori of the rest of its conception.
    — Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader, 16 Apr. 2018
  • If evolution is not taken as an a priori, then these evidences are far less compelling.
    — Carl Zimmer, Discover Magazine, 22 July 2012
  • My point is that, a priori, there is no reason to assume a beneficial effect of this kind of stimulation.
    — Neuroskeptic, Discover Magazine, 21 July 2019
  • This sort of a priori justification for ESAs explains a few things.
    — Chandler Fritz, Harpers Magazine, 20 Aug. 2025
  • But the non-black people at the conference could not comprehend or explain this a priori species division between the human and the slave.
    — Frank B. Wilderson Iii, Harper's Magazine, 30 Mar. 2020
  • That set of capabilities have to be put in place a priori, and not post facto, on this thing, to be able to say, OK, something happened.
    — WSJ, 18 Dec. 2017
  • For anyone with a truly open mind, the a priori case for UFOs as a scientific anomaly is firmly established.
    — Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, 2 July 2018
  • These new loops manufacture demand, legitimacy, and cultural weight—not because of what the content says, but because of how it was engineered a priori.
    — Emil Steiner, Forbes.com, 14 Aug. 2025
  • Our cognitive analysis is not intended to debunk every anti-GMO claim a priori.
    — Stefaan Blancke, Scientific American, 18 Aug. 2015
  • Smart contracts allow creating communication protocols that do not require a priori trust between parties.
    — David Balaban, Forbes, 11 Feb. 2023
  • For instance, grant applications, and requests for ethical approval, already contain detailed a priori protocols in most cases.
    — Neuroskeptic, Discover Magazine, 23 Sep. 2012
  • The problem is a priori identifying that one small zone, which has proved notoriously difficult to do, even with the most sophisticated, high resolution models.
    — Jason Samenow, Washington Post, 11 Sep. 2020
  • For Kant, reason is universal, infallible and a priori—meaning independent of experience.
    — Yoram Hazony, WSJ, 6 Apr. 2018
  • In the nascent American Republic, where some humans could vote and most others were in coverture to their voting husbands or were the property of those men, the notion of majority representation was corrupted a priori.
    — Shannon Pufahl, The New York Review of Books, 21 Apr. 2020

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