How to Use disuse in a Sentence

disuse

noun
  • The room was dusty from disuse.
  • The good news is that the heart can bounce back after disuse.
    — Alice Park, Time, 8 Jan. 2018
  • Beneath the dirt and disuse of the Uvalde home are signs of the home’s past grandeur.
    — Richard A. Marini, San Antonio Express-News, 25 Apr. 2018
  • If none of this ever came to pass, Davis would languish from disuse.
    — Palma Joy Strand, Slate Magazine, 19 Sep. 2017
  • Our jaws are now smaller and weaker from disuse, our teeth more crowded and crooked.
    — Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic, 13 Sep. 2022
  • But disuse and the grinding gears of time forced them out of service 12 years ago.
    — Washington Post, 2 Mar. 2022
  • Yet the upper body can more easily fall into disuse.
    — Lisa Jarvis, Twin Cities, 19 Apr. 2026
  • The muscles in his arms started to atrophy from disuse.
    — Literary Hub, 22 Sep. 2025
  • The practice of keeping the body in the urn has not fallen into complete disuse.
    — Washington Post, 25 Oct. 2017
  • The wildcat notes, which once fueled frontier cities’ economies, fell into disuse.
    — Declan Harty, Fortune, 7 Oct. 2021
  • The air was cold down there, and musty from a combination of old electronics and disuse.
    — Peter Kujawinski, New York Times, 28 May 2018
  • The floors and walls are wooden, and chairs and tables are arranged in a manner that suggests years of disuse.
    — Faustine Ngila, Quartz, 12 Sep. 2022
  • In the city, some public high school campuses have pools, but in last two decades, many have fallen into disuse.
    — New York Times, 29 June 2022
  • Most of the few cars in the underground garage are caked in grayish dust, their tires long since deflated by years of disuse.
    — Connor Sheetsstaff Writer, Los Angeles Times, 27 Oct. 2022
  • What good’s power, after all, if its disuse leaves the public unoppressed?
    — Brian T. Allen, National Review, 16 July 2022
  • After a fire in 2000, though, parts of it were thrown into disuse and left to ruin.
    — Lale Arikoglu, Condé Nast Traveler, 17 Aug. 2024
  • Bales of wire, rusted gates and a smattering of broken furniture lie about in disuse.
    — Mare Czinar, The Arizona Republic, 23 Feb. 2023
  • But most had gone into disuse, overgrown by fields and forests – until the 1990s.
    — Sara Miller Llana, The Christian Science Monitor, 25 Aug. 2021
  • State laws don’t lose their effect through disuse, Urmanski said.
    — Todd Richmond, Chicago Tribune, 4 May 2023
  • Over the years, the structures and murals of Storyland fell into disuse.
    — Bill Van Niekerken, SFChronicle.com, 3 July 2019
  • And does a particular level of disuse have to be reached for a word to be dropped into the lexical dustbin?
    — Louis Menand, New Yorker, 22 Dec. 2025
  • Heart muscles atrophy, or weaken from disuse, in adults who spend prolonged times in the weightlessness of space.
    — Literary Hub, 20 Feb. 2026
  • In the two and half decades since, MORC 2 has fallen prey to disuse and neglect.
    — Matt Blitz, Popular Mechanics, 27 Nov. 2018
  • To be clear, these technologies are in no way a substitute for the smarter use of water—or really, disuse of water.
    — Matt Simon, Wired, 18 Oct. 2021
  • But the gains decline to 60 cents if, as often happens, the new social norms fail to take hold and the latrines fall into disuse.
    — The Economist, 16 Nov. 2019
  • Gosney's second-floor view is gravel, overgrown weeds and a metal building that has fallen into disuse.
    — Scott Wartman, Cincinnati.com, 18 Oct. 2017
  • As the demand for Ghana’s goods decreased, so did the need for the industrial railway line, leading to its disuse.
    — Edna Bonhomme, Artforum, 1 Oct. 2025
  • His tribe was known as Catawba, and their language, from which words like Ye Iswąˀ had come, had fallen into disuse.
    — John Paul Brammer, NBC News, 8 May 2017
  • When the man who cared for the land and animals became ill, the area fell into disuse and residents started disposing of their garbage there.
    — Siobhan Reid, Vogue, 20 Apr. 2022
  • After years in disuse, Gia Hoa Ryan revived the building as an events and cultural space.
    — Jordyn Grzelewski, cleveland.com, 7 June 2019

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