How to Use dam in a Sentence

dam

1 of 2 noun
  • The pros use steam to melt ice dams.
    — Brandee Gruener, Southern Living, 27 Jan. 2026
  • Here's what to know about ice dams.
    — Jr Radcliffe, jsonline.com, 11 Dec. 2025
  • But a lot of the dams are in bad shape.
    — Katie Thornton, New Yorker, 24 Oct. 2025
  • Both are wild and scenic rivers with no dams.
    — Outside, 4 Nov. 2025
  • Large icicles are a sign of ice dams on a home.
    — Sean Krofssik, Hartford Courant, 4 Feb. 2026
  • Rock dams have been built to hem in the hot water, and pools vary in depth.
    — Graham Averill, Outside, 12 Dec. 2025
  • Think of the floating ice shelf as a dam that holds back the ice sheet on land.
    — WIRED, 27 Oct. 2023
  • The sky is the limit now that this dam has broken.
    — Paul Tassi, Forbes.com, 21 Jan. 2026
  • What damage can ice dams cause on houses?
    — Bridget Fogarty, jsonline.com, 11 Dec. 2025
  • The water ripped apart a two-lane road and fences that ran across the top of the dam.
    — Jan M. Olsen, Anchorage Daily News, 9 Aug. 2023
  • Here's how to prevent ice dams this season.
    — Sarah Moore, Freep.com, 12 Dec. 2025
  • Belief systems, turns out, can be like dams.
    — Annalisa Merelli, STAT, 24 Mar. 2026
  • Here's what to know about ice dams and how to prevent damage.
    — Bridget Fogarty, jsonline.com, 11 Dec. 2025
  • That snow starts to melt; the water freezes again and causes a dam.
    — Paul Burton, CBS News, 2 Feb. 2026
  • By 2024, most of the giant dams were gone.
    — The Editors, Outside, 15 Dec. 2025
  • As Weir began playing it, a dam burst.
    — David Browne, Rolling Stone, 17 Feb. 2026
  • All of this happens because of ice dams in the gutters.
    — Sarah Moore, Freep.com, 12 Dec. 2025
  • At one point, the water reached less than 6 inches from the top of the dam.
    — Dejanay Booth-Singleton, CBS News, 26 June 2026
  • And in order to construct the dam, workers sliced off part of a hill.
    — Sara Novak, Discover Magazine, 30 Nov. 2023
  • The long-term goal is to replace the dam built in 1918.
    — Elizabeth Marie Himchak, San Diego Union-Tribune, 22 Dec. 2025
  • The water mafia kept building dams that would never fill.
    — Nik Kowsar, Time, 2 Oct. 2025
  • When the dam collapsed, his home was in the way of the floodwater.
    — Giulia Carbonaro, MSNBC Newsweek, 18 Aug. 2025
  • The kayaker – small as a thumb from the dam wall – eases inside.
    — Alfredo Sosa, Christian Science Monitor, 24 June 2026
  • The dam is two hours north of Roanoke and about an hour and a half west of Staunton.
    — Tara Massouleh McCay, Southern Living, 16 May 2026
  • The dam is two hours north of Roanoke and about an hour and a half west of Staunton.
    — Tara Massouleh McCay, Southern Living, 3 June 2026
  • The dam is two hours north of Roanoke and about an hour and a half west of Staunton.
    — Tara Massouleh McCay, Southern Living, 15 Aug. 2025
  • But Bear Creek Lake sits behind a high dam.
    — Alan Gionet, CBS News, 24 Feb. 2026
  • Ginger the beaver made a dam good leading lady.
    — Elizabeth Hernandez, Denver Post, 16 Apr. 2026
  • Six large dams upstream did make flows more regular.
    — Edward Lotterman, Twin Cities, 1 Feb. 2026
  • The dam had been thwarted by persistent drought, then sprung leaks.
    — Julie Bourdin, NPR, 11 Apr. 2026

dam

2 of 2 verb
  • It wasn't dammed up then, and the water came gushing out icy cold!
    — Michael Barnes, Austin American Statesman, 4 Jan. 2026
  • That way, rain will cascade right off the lid without damming up against the bottom frame member.
    — Joseph Truini, Popular Mechanics, 27 Mar. 2023
  • Nature and aesthetics be dammed.
    — Chadd Scott, Forbes.com, 10 Aug. 2025
  • The trade-offs in deciding whether to dam a wild river can be difficult to assess.
    — John Wendle, Scientific American, 29 June 2016
  • The country will need to dam even more rivers to guarantee water through the end of the century.
    — Tribune News Service, Hartford Courant, 10 Jan. 2024
  • Plants can regenerate, since the beavers have dammed up the water to keep some for their little ecosystem.
    — Katie Grant, Parents, 4 Mar. 2026
  • As these boar and beavers escape, digging up his neighbor’s fields and damming his streams, the two farmers begin to butt heads.
    — Christopher Vourlias, Variety, 2 Mar. 2026
  • Unlike many other beavers, these specific beavers were willing to dam a flashy urban stream.
    — Literary Hub, 19 Sep. 2025
  • Newitz asked House for suggestions on how characters would dam a river.
    — Patrick J. Kiger, Los Angeles Times, 9 Mar. 2023
  • Firefighters worked to dam the gutters and storm drains due to the quantity of the runoff and shut down Yale.
    — Alan Gionet, CBS News, 28 Nov. 2025
  • Glacial lake outburst floods occur when depressions dammed by glacier ice or rock fill with meltwater and overflow or burst through their dams.
    — Pintu Kumar Mahla, The Conversation, 25 Aug. 2025
  • Glacial outburst floods happen when the ice dams holding back glacial lakes fail, allowing a sudden release of water.
    — Stephanie Pappas, Scientific American, 13 Aug. 2025
  • Retreating glaciers around the world have created unstable lakes that are dammed by ice or sediment.
    — Anna Canny, Anchorage Daily News, 13 Aug. 2023
  • Glacial lake outburst floods – when water that is dammed up by a glacier is suddenly released – are becoming more frequent.
    — Matthew L. Druckenmiller, The Conversation, 16 Dec. 2025
  • Calling everything worthless is a misguided attempt to dam the flood rather than channel it.
    — Deni Ellis Béchard, Scientific American, 8 Nov. 2025
  • Officials initially planned to dam up the river to create a lake, Derman said.
    — Chris Kenning, USA Today, 25 Nov. 2025
  • Capitalism is a group of people who have enough money to get upstream and take giant buckets, take all the water, dam it up.
    — Riley Van Steward, Forbes, 27 Mar. 2023
  • Both rivers are dammed upstream, in part for flood control, but the reservoirs that hold back the water are at near capacity and letting flows through.
    — Kurtis Alexander, San Francisco Chronicle, 20 Mar. 2023
  • Are hydropower dams a valuable source of climate-friendly energy or fish-killing monstrosities that should be torn down?
    — Sammy Roth, Los Angeles Times, 2 May 2023
  • This method is more successful when the barrier is positioned to redirect the flow of lava, rather than simply dam it.
    — Erik Klemetti, Discover Magazine, 27 Mar. 2014
  • But today many of these tributaries are dammed, polluted, or choked with sediment from heavy industry.
    — Gabe Allen, Discover Magazine, 30 Dec. 2023
  • Teams are now working to pump in clean water to the section, which was dammed following the crash to contain any contamination.
    — Morgan Winsor, ABC News, 17 Feb. 2023
  • The affected portions of the stream have been dammed to protect the downstream water, according to the company.
    — Sasha Pezenik, ABC News, 21 Feb. 2023
  • The time to dam the rivers of violence, to stop the flow of guns into our city and to protect the lives of our children is NOW.
    — Daniel Kreps, Rolling Stone, 11 June 2022
  • In the midst of the valley, at the confluence of two rivers that have been dammed and diverted almost to the point of disappearance, there is a wilderness.
    — Jake Bittle, WIRED, 6 Jan. 2024
  • But starting more than a century ago, people began to dam and straighten many of them for drinking water, flood control and hydropower.
    — Evan Bush, NBC news, 16 Dec. 2025
  • Greater melting is filling glacial lakes to the brim, causing disastrous floods when rocky ridges that dam the lakes burst because of the immense water pressure behind them.
    — Walter Immerzeel, Scientific American, 1 Jan. 2021
  • That can help identify whether your home is at risk of ice dams, and lead to insulation upgrades and other services to mitigate ice damming in the future.
    — Bridget Fogarty, jsonline.com, 11 Dec. 2025
  • Tenuously held back by moraines – the jumble of rock and sediment deposited by glaciers at their edges – or dammed by glacier ice, these lakes are anything but stable.
    — Dan McGrath, The Conversation, 9 Mar. 2026
  • Some members of the water development commission suggested Utah needs to dam more rivers.
    — Brian Maffly, The Salt Lake Tribune, 14 Sep. 2021

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