How to Use dead air in a Sentence

dead air

noun
  • After the commercial, there were a few seconds of dead air before the show continued.
  • The guitars stop, the snare drum hits and there's dead air in the song.
    — Steve Baltin, Forbes, 5 July 2022
  • Floor fans thrummed but did little more than push around the thick, dead air.
    — Katharine Q. Seelye Photographs By Todd Heisler, New York Times, 21 Jan. 2018
  • The actors aren’t dragging, but there’s still dead air.
    — Sara Holdren, Vulture, 14 Nov. 2025
  • Because of that, there was no dead air in which to squeeze in an analysis.
    — Dallas News, 2 Jan. 2022
  • Here's how to rethink your support model to get that dead air down to 0%.
    — Clara Shih, Forbes, 14 Oct. 2021
  • How many times did their censors have to give us dead air time because somebody was swearing?
    — Paul Daugherty, Cincinnati.com, 18 June 2018
  • Many of us would rather talk over someone than risk an excruciating bout of dead air.
    — Sara Novak, Discover Magazine, 24 July 2021
  • Silence, meanwhile, is typically seen as a sign that one side is stumped—dead air is for losers.
    — Anne Quito, Quartz, 8 Apr. 2021
  • The last thing family reunions want or need is dead air or awkward silence, so many are planned to the hilt.
    — Richard Morgan, WSJ, 22 May 2021
  • Hold music is engineered to fill dead air and keep people on the line until help arrives.
    — Sumathi Reddy, WSJ, 24 July 2018
  • When the weekend came around and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, the two sat on the porch of their shack and talked around the dead air-conditioner.
    — Thomas McGuane, The New Yorker, 3 Oct. 2022
  • On the flip side, a crappy edit can lead to dead air and thoughtless cuts that dull the impact of both the picture and the story.
    — Caroline Framke, Vox, 2 Apr. 2018
  • So that was a pricey bit of dead air about an hour in, when screens across America went unexpectedly black.
    — Ellen Gray, Philly.com, 4 Feb. 2018
  • Renegades suffers from a pacing issue; there’s an almost unusual amount of dead air here.
    — Craig Jenkins, Vulture, 9 Mar. 2021
  • On opening night, there were several moments of dead air — nothing happening on stage and no music from the stage band.
    — Lee Williams, OregonLive.com, 19 Feb. 2018
  • The on-stage costume changes also felt uncoordinated and led to moments of dead air.
    — Brandon T. Harden, Philly.com, 22 Apr. 2018
  • After several seconds of dead air, Sandusky went back to calling the game as normal.
    — Andrew Joseph, USA TODAY, 25 Oct. 2021
  • Aside from technical glitches, there was uncomfortably dead air and forced improv.
    — Madeleine Marr, Miami Herald, 8 Jan. 2026
  • After five minutes of dead air that seemed like an eternity, a robotic-sounding, disembodied voice came on the line.
    — New York Times, 2 Apr. 2020
  • Unfortunately, the mode features a lot of dead air with 45 seconds between rounds.
    — Brittany Vincent, BGR, 22 Oct. 2021
  • The launch included first-day jitters that frankly surprised me — dead air due to late-starting commercials being the most common.
    — Richard Wagoner, Daily News, 25 May 2026
  • Contact a glass company for professional installation, because the two pieces of glass must be sealed with dead air space.
    — Elle Decor Staff, ELLE Decor, 5 July 2012
  • Booth references popular movies, deflates tension with snarky jokes, and fills dead air with winking bloviation.
    — David Sims, The Atlantic, 10 Nov. 2021
  • Instead, his career has turned into the same re-run, playing in an endless loop, filling dead air on daytime TV.
    — Kyle Whitmire, al, 22 Apr. 2020
  • He's allowed only two home runs to date, but pitching more often in the dead air in San Francisco no doubt helped keep that number low.
    — Todd Rosiak, Journal Sentinel, 24 July 2022
  • The idea was to keep things flowing and fill any dead air, but as the QuikTrip trope-slicer reminds, there’s something to be said for natural rhythm.
    — Vulture, 29 Jan. 2022
  • Instead, too many filmmakers took the crowd’s attention span for granted; even the strongest films in competition could delete a half-hour of dead air.
    — Joshua Rothkopf, Los Angeles Times, 22 May 2026
  • But the hurdles used to prolong her rise grow tedious and predictable, as if some unseen producer was prodding the anchorperson to fill dead air.
    — Brian Lowry, CNN, 22 Oct. 2020
  • The songs uploaded to client profiles were often nothing more than basic looping beats or, in at least one case, extended periods of dead air.
    — Craig Silverman, ProPublica, 31 Aug. 2022

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