How to Use abacus in a Sentence

abacus

noun
  • Pebbles as used on an abacus, to count out money, votes, and distances.
    — Weike Wang, The New Yorker, 27 July 2023
  • The bookkeeper went up to his abacus hanging on a nail and slid a black bead from right to left along its spindle.
    — Joanne Turnbull, Harper's Magazine, 23 June 2020
  • There are also two manual sliding abacus scorers on each end.
    — Rachel Klein, Popular Mechanics, 12 Oct. 2022
  • Its surface shimmers with a girlie patina of iridescent pink and turns stacks of abacus beads into bangle bracelets.
    — Deborah Solomon, New York Times, 13 Feb. 2025
  • Remember that no prescription is required — so no need to reach for your abacus to calculate a co-pay or rebate.
    — Ed Silverman, STAT, 10 June 2026
  • Math, for instance, might be represented by an abacus, while reading can be represented by a book.
    — Matt Villano, CNN, 11 Aug. 2020
  • What are you guys doing, using an abacus to calculate pre-money valuation?
    — Neil Senturia, San Diego Union-Tribune, 4 May 2026
  • Other areas had polygons to trace, 3D shapes to play with, simple abacuses, pens and pencils and paper, and so on.
    — Andrew McAfee, Fortune, 14 Nov. 2023
  • There are rolling bunnies and whales, a plane, fire trucks, cars, a 3D elephant puzzle, boxes with drawers, a tic-tac-toe game built like an abacus and more.
    — Holly Haber, Dallas News, 13 Dec. 2022
  • The Guidestones are an abacus compared to Stonehenge’s computer.
    — Jill Neimark, Discover Magazine, 9 Sep. 2013
  • The exhibit tracks milestones in the progress of computational technology from the abacus to your smart phone.
    — Discover Magazine, 24 June 2011
  • Recall the image of the many copies of a quantum abacus, distributed across many realities, all working in parallel.
    — Stephon Alexander, Wired, 31 Aug. 2021
  • Gould views performance data from the 2010s as completely outdated, akin to counting with an abacus.
    — Jon Wilner, Mercury News, 5 June 2025
  • Generally speaking, the abacus is more impressive, or at least more potentially useful.
    — Robert Hackett, Fortune, 8 Dec. 2020
  • This compact busy board is for children 12 months and older and includes a maze, abacus, peek-a-boo door with a surprise mirror inside, gears, a light switch toggle, and a three-prong plug.
    — Chaunie Brusie, Rn, Parents, 7 Feb. 2025
  • We’re told that quantum will change everything, making today’s supercomputers look like abacuses.
    — Peter Bendor-Samuel, Forbes.com, 7 May 2025
  • Workers mixed mortar and drove a scissor lift to the edge of a concrete plinth surmounted by four steel rods—supports for the Buddha, whose sandstone body would slide down them in four parts, like beads in an abacus.
    — Julian Lucas, New Yorker, 4 May 2026
  • Last month, the mom of three shared a video of the two boys playing with a giant abacus in the park, crouched down together before turning around and looking at the camera and toddling off in different directions.
    — Angela Andaloro, Peoplemag, 15 Feb. 2023
  • John tells fellow Hawaiians of the wisdom kept in this game like how the stone carvings from hundreds of years ago are believed to have been used as an abacus-esque device for managing and allocating land.
    — Matt Negrin, Rolling Stone, 20 Sep. 2025
  • In other words, even if his characterization of the past is accurate, breaking out the abacus for some good old moral accounting does not necessarily make for good policy.
    — Mike Watson, National Review, 3 Dec. 2020
  • Kids ages 5-12 can handle replica artifacts, such as an abacus, armor and lyre, and learn how professional archeologists make inferences.
    — Jennifer Day, Chicago Tribune, 19 Feb. 2026
  • All activities on the board, including counting flaps and an abacus, are made of pinewood and metal, which combine beautifully into an aesthetically pleasing design.
    — Maya Polton, Parents, 8 Mar. 2024
  • Who could possibly object to the celebration of calligraphy and glassblowing, of dragon boats, abacus calculation, and mariachi?
    — Julian Lucas, The New Yorker, 2 Mar. 2024
  • Cultural classes — kite and lantern making, Chinese embroidery, Mandarin language and counting with an abacus — are offered along with other exhibitions.
    — Mary Jacobs, Dallas News, 25 May 2021
  • This is like the difference between building a stick-in-the-ground sundial versus a comparatively more complex accounting tool like an abacus, as one head of quantum research at a major Wall Street bank put it to me.
    — Robert Hackett, Fortune, 8 Dec. 2020
  • At least for the next year, there’s little that liberal activists can do to really tinker with the abacus in Washington; the seats here are decided until November of 2022.
    — Philip Elliott, Time, 29 Mar. 2021
  • All forms of classical computing, whether an abacus, a personal laptop, or a high-performance cluster of machines in a national security facility, follow what scholars call Boolean logic.
    — Charina Chou, Foreign Affairs, 7 Jan. 2025

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