How to Use ellipse in a Sentence

ellipse

noun
  • That's because all planets orbit the sun in a slight ellipse.
    — Jamie Carter, Forbes, 16 Jan. 2025
  • The storm will move into the right entrance region of the jet streak, shown by the large red ellipse.
    — Washington Post, 3 Aug. 2020
  • Instead, the moon traces out a geometric figure known as an ellipse.
    — Martin Weil, Washington Post, 29 Jan. 2018
  • That’s because the moon’s orbit around the Earth is an ellipse, not a circle.
    — Jeffrey Kluger, Time, 18 Aug. 2017
  • For context, an ellipse is just a circle that has been stretched in one direction to give it an oval shape.
    — Sarah Wells, Popular Mechanics, 16 Aug. 2021
  • There are constantly rallies on the ellipse, Bopp told the court.
    — Aaron Navarro, CBS News, 22 Apr. 2022
  • The circle became an ellipse, expanding east, pushed by the gust.
    — Kevin Dupzyk, Popular Mechanics, 4 Oct. 2018
  • The exact speed varies a little over the course of the year, because Earth’s orbit is an ellipse.
    — Corey S Powell, Discover Magazine, 24 Jan. 2018
  • The moon’s orbital path around Earth is a slight ellipse, so there’s a near-point (perigee) and a far-point (apogee) every month.
    — Jamie Carter, Forbes, 13 Oct. 2024
  • This is because the shape of the moon's orbit is not a perfect circle, but rather an oval or ellipse, much like a chicken egg.
    — Miriam Fauzia, USA TODAY, 26 May 2021
  • Since the moon’s orbital path around Earth is a slight ellipse, there’s a near-point (perigee) and a far-point (apogee) every month.
    — Jamie Carter, Forbes, 18 Oct. 2024
  • Since the moon’s orbital path around Earth is a slight ellipse, there’s a near-point (perigee) and a far-point (apogee) every month.
    — Jamie Carter, Forbes, 14 Sep. 2024
  • Supermoons occur because the moon orbits the Earth in the shape of an ellipse.
    — Isabel Garcia, House Beautiful, 11 Mar. 2020
  • The space telescope will fly in a large ellipse that takes it out beyond the moon and then in close to the Earth to downlink its data.
    — Jay Bennett, Popular Mechanics, 18 Apr. 2018
  • The form movement takes the shape of a double ellipse as opposed to a traditional round movement.
    — Cait Bazemore, Robb Report, 24 Mar. 2023
  • Just like the shape of an ellipse, all these laws can be described using mathematical equations.
    — Max Tegmark, Discover Magazine, 3 Nov. 2013
  • Any straight line drawn from one focus to the circumference of the ellipse is reflected to the other focus.
    — Quanta Magazine, 30 June 2016
  • Next, determine the style and size of the arch (half circle, partial circle, or ellipse), and make a pattern out of cardboard.
    — Kate McGregor, House Beautiful, 2 June 2023
  • In other words, the orbit can be elliptical, but the ellipse can have any orientation in space.
    — Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 17 May 2020
  • The floor of the upper ellipse also curves up and down, giving the hall an unfixed, fluctuating profile.
    — Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 22 May 2017
  • That’s because the moon’s orbital path around Earth is a slight ellipse, so there’s always a near-point (perigee) and a far-point (apogee) every month.
    — Jamie Carter, Forbes, 16 Aug. 2024
  • Imagine seeing a tiny sliver of a line and being asked to draw the ellipse that line was a part of — that was the mathematical challenge.
    — Brian Resnick, Vox, 30 Apr. 2018
  • Populations of the ellipse are declining across the state, Inoue said.
    — Morgan Greene, chicagotribune.com, 25 Sep. 2020
  • That ellipse pattern can be seen across the door panels also, and, in another first for the marque, the graphic covers both the door panel face and the armrest area.
    — Nicole Hoey, Robb Report, 1 May 2026
  • The moon orbits the Earth in an ovular shape called an ellipse, meaning sometimes the moon is closer, and sometimes the moon is farther away from Earth.
    — Drew Dawson, Journal Sentinel, 28 Aug. 2023
  • The moon orbits the Earth in an ovular shape called an ellipse, meaning sometimes the moon is closer, and sometimes the moon is farther away from Earth.
    — Claire Reid, Journal Sentinel, 20 July 2023
  • In the twelve untitled poems that ran on quarto-size pages, scattered with varied-length ellipses, his long lines expand and contract between the margins like the steady crash of waves.
    — Jeffrey Yang, The New Yorker, 22 Mar. 2017
  • The spacecraft traced a long ellipse, reaching lunar distance but then falling back to Earth and burning up on reentry over the Pacific Ocean.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 15 Feb. 2024
  • Comet Borisov arrived from deep space moving at 32 kilometers per second, and its orbit past the Sun looked more like a bent line than a tidy planetary ellipse.
    — Corey S. Powell, Discover Magazine, 30 June 2020
  • The final garden is laid out in an ellipse that spans the full width of the property and is home to flowering shrubs native to China, Japan, and Virginia.
    — Victoria Johnson, ELLE Decor, 1 June 2022

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