How to Use abiotic in a Sentence

abiotic

adjective
  • But did they, as was claimed, rule out all abiotic scenarios?
    — Ethan Siegel, Big Think, 19 Sep. 2025
  • And yet, every clue has an abiotic escape hatch.
    — Kaif Shaikh, Interesting Engineering, 11 Sep. 2025
  • Ten amino acids could be made, and the rest could be harvested from natural, abiotic sources.
    — Jeffrey Marlow, Discover Magazine, 21 Mar. 2017
  • Furthermore, the curved and bent filaments seem to rule out any abiotic look-alikes.
    — Jennifer Frazer, Scientific American, 24 Sep. 2021
  • If so, the problem is more likely to be with your an abiotic issue, such as soil nutrients, than with a living pest.
    — oregonlive, 7 May 2020
  • This type of stress is called abiotic stress and results from unmet plant needs, usually too much or too little of something.
    — Rita Perwich, San Diego Union-Tribune, 1 Apr. 2023
  • However, abiotic fatty acids do tend to be smaller in size than 12 carbon atoms.
    — Keith Cooper, Space.com, 25 Mar. 2025
  • Yet all of these can come from abiotic sources, such as ozone from water vapor in the atmosphere, or sulfides from volcanoes.
    — WIRED, 2 Oct. 2023
  • Is that something a fungus or bacteria does, or is there some abiotic chain-reaction taking place?
    — Alex Fox, Smithsonian Magazine, 8 Oct. 2020
  • As always, though, there are totally abiotic pathways that could create these molecules as well.
    — Nathaniel Scharping, Discover Magazine, 27 June 2018
  • The time young sharks spend in nurseries depends on both biotic and abiotic factors that aren't fully understood.
    — Melissa Cristina Márquez, Forbes, 10 Oct. 2022
  • Plant issues are usually caused by either abiotic or biotic stressors.
    — Mary Marlowe Leverette, Southern Living, 26 Apr. 2026
  • Some of these abiotic pathways would not only produce an excess of oxygen, but would also render a planet totally lifeless.
    — Lee Billings, Scientific American, 22 Feb. 2017
  • Right here on our own planet, structures suggested to be of organismal origins are often later shown to have abiotic provenance.
    — Robin George Andrews, Scientific American, 6 Aug. 2021
  • The trouble is that many simple biosignatures can be produced both by living things and through abiotic geochemical processes.
    — Natalie Elliot, Scientific American, 16 July 2021
  • So far, scientists haven’t managed to come up with an abiotic explanation for oxygen-methane biosignatures.
    — Elise Cutts, WIRED, 7 Apr. 2024
  • Wheat, rice, corn, barley, rye and oats are some of the grasses that can be self-pollinated but also utilize biotic and abiotic (wind) pollinators.
    — Jodi Bay, San Diego Union-Tribune, 13 Mar. 2021
  • Organic carbon can be abiotic – that is, unrelated to a living organism.
    — Amy J. Williams, Discover Magazine, 16 Mar. 2024
  • Its creators hope to soon program the bot to measure young plant health, corn ear height, soybean pods, plant biomass as well as detect and identify diseases and abiotic stresses, according to the site.
    — Rachael Lallensack, Smithsonian, 1 Oct. 2019
  • In abiotic — environments absent of life — impacts can be pivotal actors in facilitating the origin of life events.
    — Conor Feehly, Discover Magazine, 23 Oct. 2024
  • Serious disease, insect or abiotic problems in western red cedar usually cause overall discoloration, thinning of the crown, dieback of the top and then the entire tree.
    — oregonlive, 12 Dec. 2020
  • The authors did consider some abiotic pathways for creating the compounds that were found in the Martian rock, and determined that those pathways were non-viable.
    — Ethan Siegel, Big Think, 19 Sep. 2025
  • However, this research demonstrates that oxygen can also form through abiotic processes, or processes that aren't rooted in living organisms.
    — Victoria Corless, Space.com, 2 Jan. 2025
  • But the team aims to show that geochemical models, which simulate how water saturated with chemicals will precipitate them out, will predict the kind of abiotic crystals found there.
    — Sarah Scoles, Scientific American, 13 Jan. 2023
  • Further experiments showed that the same tiny formations can be the result of geologic—completely abiotic—processes.
    — Jeffrey Kluger, Time, 1 June 2026
  • The biotic and abiotic elements that render Socotra so unique have existed and evolved there for millions of years, many remaining effectively unchanged in this time.
    — Vogue, 17 Feb. 2023
  • There are plenty of inorganic/abiotic pathways to produce oxygen under laboratory conditions, and these could be at play on an exoplanet.
    — Big Think, 17 Feb. 2026
  • Another was a sample from the Murchison meteorite, a bolide rich in organic (but abiotic) carbon compounds that fell to Earth in 1969.
    — Natalie Elliot, Scientific American, 23 Nov. 2021
  • While some abiotic processes can also make the compound under certain conditions, the team’s analysis suggested those processes weren’t likely to occur on Venus.
    — Quanta Magazine, 3 Nov. 2022
  • But subsequent studies showed the putative microfossils could have easily been produced by several other entirely abiotic routes.
    — Natalie Elliot, Scientific American, 23 Nov. 2021

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'abiotic.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: