How to Use counterexample in a Sentence

counterexample

noun
  • This is not to say there aren’t counterexamples and gray areas.
    — Jack Butler, National Review, 14 Mar. 2020
  • Lately though, counterexamples seem to be massing at the gate.
    — M.j. Andersen, BostonGlobe.com, 16 Feb. 2023
  • Of course, gut feeling and a lack of counterexamples don't constitute a proof.
    — Jack Murtagh, Scientific American, 22 Dec. 2023
  • Of course, gut feeling and a lack of counterexamples don’t constitute a proof.
    — Jack Murtagh, Scientific American, 22 Dec. 2023
  • The coding-tool fight is the counterexample running in real time.
    — Jon Markman, Forbes.com, 1 June 2026
  • Utah State is the counterexample.
    — Ira Gorawara, New York Times, 22 Mar. 2026
  • Israel, which drafts both men and women, is often cited as a counterexample.
    — Rich Lowry, National Review, 27 July 2021
  • But be wary of anyone who says that the best way to always proceed is to find a counterexample or aim to disprove something.
    — Lance Eliot, Forbes.com, 26 May 2026
  • Nobody yet knows if a counterexample exists in four or five dimensions.
    — Jordana Cepelewicz, Quanta Magazine, 14 May 2024
  • And now the pandemic has served up a counterexample of how the government can, in fact, be helpful.
    — Justin Lahart, WSJ, 25 June 2021
  • Sally and Thang were the de facto counterexamples in the trial.
    — New York Times, 30 Aug. 2019
  • Townsend, a member of the project, went to study the Ik to find a counterexample to generous cultures.
    — Leah Shaffer, Discover Magazine, 25 Feb. 2019
  • The counterexample that demonstrates the genius of his approach is France.
    — Cameron Hilditch, National Review, 18 Sep. 2020
  • The Hantzsche-Wendt group seemed like a fruitful place to search for a counterexample to the unit conjecture.
    — Quanta Magazine, 12 Apr. 2021
  • Hollom found a counterexample to this version of the conjecture.
    — Joseph Howlett, WIRED, 24 Nov. 2024
  • The counterexamples did not hold up, suggesting that the conjecture might be correct after all.
    — Steve Nadis, Quanta Magazine, 16 Oct. 2023
  • One of the apparent counterexamples is easy to explain, the tearjerker.
    — Big Think, 23 Sep. 2025
  • However, one strange counterexample is the contrast in lifespan among different sized dog breeds.
    — Conor Feehly, Discover Magazine, 3 May 2023
  • But Rosenfeld had already shown that in any counterexample, the product would have to be divisible by all those primes.
    — Quanta Magazine, 6 Mar. 2026
  • Menendez is one counterexample, and Epstein himself was a billionaire who died in a jail cell, after all.
    — Adam Serwer, The Atlantic, 26 Feb. 2026
  • Navalny himself, his life and death, might be the best counterexample to Tolstoy’s theory.
    — Gal Beckerman, The Atlantic, 21 Oct. 2024
  • In other words, a counterexample to the lonely runner conjecture couldn’t exist — at least, not for eight runners.
    — Quanta Magazine, 6 Mar. 2026
  • The debate over whether and how to reopen schools in the United States offers a useful counterexample.
    — Jacob Leibenluft, Foreign Affairs, 19 Aug. 2020
  • In just the last few days, practitioners in my field have changed their minds on critical issues based on a handful of examples and counterexamples.
    — Neel Shah, STAT, 11 Apr. 2020
  • Some cops are corrupt, as many leaders have been, but Hermes is a diligent and dedicated counterexample.
    — Peter Debruge, Variety, 12 Aug. 2023
  • The great counterexample, which comes up in just about every discussion of the subject, is the growth of Silicon Valley.
    — Conor Dougherty, New York Times, 13 May 2017
  • In an era when our attention is endlessly fragmented, the lives of super-readers offer a quiet counterexample.
    — Literary Hub, 2 Apr. 2026
  • One shining counterexample is a young man who used his speech to talk of himself self-deprecatingly — a rare ability for the highest-scoring of students.
    — Luther Ray Abel, National Review, 9 July 2021
  • The great counterexample is ancient Athens, which was steered by a five-hundred-person council whose members were generally chosen by lot.
    — Alex Ross, New Yorker, 15 June 2026
  • That civilization provides both a counterexample to the notion of man’s impermanence — and a warning.
    — Jack Butler, National Review, 31 Dec. 2023

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