How to Use decile in a Sentence

decile

noun
  • Most people in the top-income decile are considered middle class.
    — E.j. Antoni, The Mercury News, 23 Mar. 2024
  • The book’s title refers to the nation’s top decile of income-earners, minus the uber-wealthy.
    — Barton Swaim, WSJ, 20 Oct. 2021
  • But even this decile is largely denied access to the heart of the second economy.
    — Rana Dasgupta, Harper's Magazine, 24 Nov. 2020
  • The income of the lowest decile fell by more than fourteen per cent, that of the second lowest by eight per cent, and so on.
    — Louis Menand, The New Yorker, 22 July 2024
  • The seventh-highest tenth won’t see much of a change in their annual wealth, while the bottom three deciles will be worse off.
    — Tobias Burns, The Hill, 26 June 2025
  • The top decile also owned 60% of housing wealth and 64% of pension assets.
    — Aroop Chatterjee, Quartz Africa, 30 Apr. 2020
  • People in the next decile consumed, on average, 15 drinks a week, and in the one below that, six drinks a week.
    — Kate Julian, The Atlantic, 1 June 2021
  • The study breaks Connecticut’s earners into deciles, or groups that earned 10% of all statewide income.
    — Keith M. Phaneuf, Hartford Courant, 17 Feb. 2024
  • Ten full tax returns, each representative of a decile of income in the United States.
    — James Fallows, The Atlantic, 24 Apr. 2018
  • The difference is that in the Obama part of the boom the income of the top decile rose by 20 percent, with tiny gains for other groups.
    — Christopher Caldwell, The New Republic, 23 Nov. 2020
  • The top decile of households (registration required) now carries an outsized share of consumer spending.
    — Michael Lukianoff, Forbes.com, 29 June 2026
  • The second and the third lowest Italian deciles have fallen globally by six and two percentiles, respectively.
    — Branko Milanovic, Foreign Affairs, 14 June 2023
  • The report found that nearly 40% of workers in the third decile of earnings have high-AI exposure and low performance requirements.
    — Matt Egan, CNN, 21 Mar. 2024
  • The economists estimate that debt forgiveness like this would be almost six times more beneficial to borrowers in the top decile of earners than borrowers in the lowest decile of earners.
    — Michael Taylor, ExpressNews.com, 9 Dec. 2020
  • The credits more than offset the cost of the tax for the lowest decile of households by income and reduced the cost for other low and moderate-income households with the relief tapering off as income rises.
    — Claudia Sahm, Twin Cities, 7 Dec. 2025
  • For comparing similarly sized departments in the table, searches are matched to nearby departments in the same nationwide decile in terms of number of officers.
    — Claire Healy, Washington Post, 6 Dec. 2022
  • The company didn’t offer health insurance to part-time workers, for example, had only minimal caregiver leave, and paid its top-earning employees a lot more than its lowest decile.
    — Cassie Werber, Quartz at Work, 9 Dec. 2019
  • In addition to significantly enhancing its growth rate and profitability, the company was rewarded with engagement scores reaching the top decile of its peer group and quit rates dropping by more than half.
    — Pete Stavros, Fortune, 9 Dec. 2025
  • Even after the recent tumble in prices, the Shiller P/E, currently at 31, sits firmly in the most expensive decile historically.
    — Spencer Jakab, WSJ, 4 Apr. 2018
  • The primary care physicians, however, must also be considered a primary target, and physician-prescribing information by decile must be used to target the highest potential physicians.
    — Andrew Joseph, STAT, 9 Jan. 2020
  • Mississippi’s literacy gains have also remained consistent across every decile on the NAEP exam.
    — The Week Us, TheWeek, 11 May 2026
  • The tariffs, according to the Budget Lab, cost households in the lowest decile less than $1,000 annually, and the median household cost is $1,400.
    — Claudia Sahm, Twin Cities, 7 Dec. 2025
  • In fact, the stock has declined roughly 55% since mid-May 2022, a performance that ranks it in the bottom decile of the large-cap index's total returns since then, at nearly -41% (total returns are higher than the change in the stock price due to dividends).
    — Michael Khouw, CNBC, 15 Jan. 2026
  • The average family in the second-lowest income tier faced an annual cost increase of $1,700; those in the top income decile paid upwards of $8,100 more per year, according to Yale Budget Lab.
    — Nick Lichtenberg, Fortune, 12 Aug. 2025
  • In fact, over the past 45 years, when Alcoa has been in the top decile of Price to 50 DMA, average returns have actually been negative over the subsequent 30 calendar days, with the stock trading lower 56% of the time.
    — Michael Khouw, CNBC, 12 Jan. 2026

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