How to Use discontinuous in a Sentence

discontinuous

adjective
  • Each take has this in and out that sounds discontinuous.
    — Destiny Jackson, Deadline, 13 Aug. 2025
  • So the internet and what things are on a screen are quick-cut, nonlinear, discontinuous, and flat.
    — Todd Vanderwerff, Vox, 25 Aug. 2018
  • He was captivated by the arrival of a completely discontinuous force in the world.
    — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 15 Nov. 2021
  • The boring parts of his story are salutary, framing the discontinuous dramas.
    — Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 14 Sep. 2020
  • The second Tim, my high-school friend, sees his life as radically discontinuous, and rightly so.
    — Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker, 3 Oct. 2022
  • The film does not try to hide the digital stitches that bind together discontinuous elements.
    — Abraham Villa Figueroa, Variety, 11 Aug. 2023
  • New Orleans is sinking, much like her former home in the discontinuous permafrost zone of Alaska.
    — Ned Rozell, Anchorage Daily News, 23 Dec. 2017
  • Spread in thin, discontinuous bands across a few miles of terrain, the ancient material is a challenge to identify and even harder to access.
    — Ella Jeffries, Smithsonian Magazine, 16 May 2025
  • Many of the papers debate whether this new model constitutes a truly discontinuous phase transition.
    — Jennifer Ouellette, Quanta Magazine, 14 July 2015
  • Sometimes the eyes in a portrait peer in different directions, evidence of the discontinuous process.
    — Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker, 21 Feb. 2011
  • Its 800-fill down is sewn into a single sheet of fabric in discontinuous channels, saving extra weight and minimizing cold spots.
    — Danny Perez, Popular Mechanics, 3 Feb. 2023
  • The problem is that leadership almost always represents a discontinuous shift.
    — Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Forbes.com, 20 Jan. 2026
  • But the fact that Flights is a novel seems somehow more true-to-life in the way that our lives, yours and mine, are discontinuous, fragmented, full of returns and departures, progress and regression.
    — Literary Hub, 16 July 2024
  • An excellent way to ensure your fire won’t accidentally spread beyond its base is to make sure its fuel source is discontinuous, Jimenez says, meaning there isn’t stray fuel near the fire.
    — Sarah Wells, Popular Mechanics, 13 Sep. 2022
  • In other words, the global village attempts to describe rather than celebrate a new situation, a new way of being in the western world which is disincarnate and discontinuous.
    — Brian A. Cogan, Encyclopedia Britannica, 27 May 2026
  • This eerie sensation is further enhanced by elliptical editing that seamlessly skips back and forth in time across the span of just a few days, creating a sense of fluidity across what should feel discontinuous.
    — Siddhant Adlakha, Variety, 15 Feb. 2026
  • All deal with an unknown future against a backdrop of disruptive and discontinuous operating environments.
    — Brad Cousins, Forbes, 23 Sep. 2021
  • All six Mary Pages are excellent, handing off, as if in a relay race, the baton of the character’s discontinuous personality.
    — Jesse Green, New York Times, 12 July 2018
  • It should be rejected because penning in the majority of the population in a small, crowded, and discontinuous territory is not the type of compromise that can ever bring peace.
    — Omri Boehm, The New York Review of Books, 9 June 2020
  • However, their mathematical models highlighted the presence of a time-discontinuous factor—a sudden shift or break in how time is represented in the system.
    — Rupendra Brahambhatt, Interesting Engineering, 15 Feb. 2025
  • It is construed as transformation, construction and alteration of reality through time; evolution as a discontinuous creation process as well.
    — Bruce Sterling, WIRED, 31 May 2013
  • The past three presidencies have been jarringly discontinuous in style, temperament, and policy.
    — Matthew Continetti, National Review, 19 Sep. 2020
  • In the current conflict, Hamas attacked Israel with much greater sophistication and scale than ever before—a massive, discontinuous change.
    — Amy Zegart, Foreign Affairs, 11 Oct. 2023
  • As temperatures rise, the boundary between continuous and discontinuous permafrost is expected to migrate north.
    — Yereth Rosen, Alaska Dispatch News, 1 Sep. 2017
  • Expected to be too young, too inexperienced, too discontinuous to make any waves in the NBA, the Jazz instead have shocked the league by arriving early.
    — Andy Larsen, The Salt Lake Tribune, 9 Nov. 2022
  • When reinforced with discontinuous fibers, vitrimers, a class of plastic, can be reshaped repeatedly, crushed, and molded into new forms many times without their chemical structure degrading.
    — Georgina Jedikovska, Interesting Engineering, 12 Aug. 2025
  • To leave the cave is to become educated about the true character of the beings experienced within it, not to discover a radically discontinuous world or reality.
    — Damon Linker, The Week, 8 Feb. 2022
  • Geologists have known since the late 19th century that the world’s fossil-bearing rocks represent a discontinuous fraction of the various environments that have come and gone through time.
    — Riley Black, Smithsonian Magazine, 21 July 2023
  • However, uncertainty coupled with the discontinuous nature of contact can lead to failure in real-world environments with unexpected height variations, such as rocky hills or curbs.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 1 July 2022
  • The world is in the early stages of a vast and likely discontinuous energy transition that will match the Industrial Revolution in its hard-to-anticipate effects.
    — Robert B. Zoellick, Foreign Affairs, 22 Feb. 2022

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