How to Use empirically in a Sentence

empirically

adverb
  • And that just turns out empirically not to be the case.
    — Quanta Magazine, 5 Dec. 2025
  • The goal isn’t to see which team is empirically the best, though.
    — Grant Brisbee, New York Times, 12 Oct. 2025
  • If the idea seemed absurd then, the passage of time has only made it empirically so.
    — Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker, 29 May 2022
  • When vibes match up to what is going on empirically in the economy, the world will be righted.
    — Phillip Molnar, San Diego Union-Tribune, 5 Jan. 2024
  • That’s a bold statement that can’t be empirically proven, but my confidence is high in this matter.
    — Jonah Flicker, Robb Report, 23 Apr. 2023
  • The ultimate goal in fascist truth, then, is not to have the best, empirically viable facts.
    — Michael Tomasky, The New Republic, 28 Aug. 2023
  • Smoking, on the other hand, has been empirically linked to sagging breasts.
    — Scott Lafee, San Diego Union-Tribune, 6 Jan. 2026
  • That may not prove empirically that Greaves is a bona fide NHL starter.
    — Aaron Portzline, New York Times, 13 Apr. 2025
  • The good news for us is that physicists do have ways of thinking about—and even empirically studying—the origins of the origin of the universe.
    — Sarah Scoles, Scientific American, 10 Feb. 2026
  • But that prediction will need to be tested empirically.
    — ArsTechnica, 9 June 2026
  • So some are questioning the tenet that observers can pool their measurements empirically.
    — George Musser, Science | AAAS, 17 Aug. 2020
  • After all, there are only so many hours of Frozen a little boy can watch each day (roughly five, empirically speaking).
    — Michael Venutolo-Mantovani, Scientific American, 9 July 2024
  • Our projects are meant to be both whimsical and of high integrity in the sense that the vision should be shared and understood empirically by meal’s end.
    — Shivani Vora, Forbes.com, 12 Aug. 2025
  • But the authors never empirically test any of their assumptions.
    — Foreign Affairs, 12 Dec. 2023
  • Which policies seem empirically most effective in fighting poverty is rather beside the point for these critics.
    — Oren Cass, CNN, 15 Sep. 2022
  • The impact of those disruptions can be tracked empirically, as the box office has failed to fully rebound from the pandemic.
    — Jordan Moreau, Variety, 23 Jan. 2025
  • There is no way to empirically verify claims of radical life extension that are being made by folks in this industry.
    — Sandee Lamotte, CNN, 7 Oct. 2024
  • And this is now a result that has built up empirically, parallel to the actual work of the government commission.
    — Ivana Kottasová, CNN, 15 Apr. 2024
  • Known as negativity bias, this has been shown empirically across a variety of contexts.
    — Hbs Working Knowledge, Forbes, 31 Aug. 2021
  • This would be a weird case however, as what are the chances that this is not only a bug, but a bug focused on the one, empirically best perk combination the grenade launcher has?
    — Paul Tassi, Forbes, 21 Oct. 2024
  • The study reinforces this point empirically.
    — Ahmed Elgammal, Fortune, 22 Jan. 2026
  • But statistics show a glimpse of a safe and ethnically diverse city that some residents can empirically confirm.
    — Alixel Cabrera, The Salt Lake Tribune, 13 Dec. 2021
  • But it hasn’t actually been tested empirically in any rigorous way.
    — Outside, 30 Dec. 2025
  • Most often, what is in question is not an empirically provable hypothesis such as whether witches exist or whether the sun orbits the Earth.
    — Kevin D. Williamson, National Review, 18 Feb. 2022
  • The difficulty of isolating the effects of dreams has always made theories of dream function hard to test empirically.
    — New York Times, 3 Nov. 2021
  • There was a story about women who are staying single getting richer in America on Bloomberg, and that is empirically false.
    — Simon Montlake, The Christian Science Monitor, 1 Apr. 2024
  • Maybe, just maybe, the totality of knowledge really can be exposed empirically.
    — Theodore McDarrah, Forbes.com, 29 Apr. 2025
  • No study has empirically evaluated whether a doctor’s union membership affects their patients’ health.
    — Patrick Aguilar, The Conversation, 10 Sep. 2025
  • Yet Picard doesn’t speak as a guru, but as an Ivy League professor who publishes in top journals and tests his ideas empirically.
    — Jasna Hodžić, Big Think, 22 Apr. 2026
  • There is a worry — going back to [the philosopher] Tim Maudlin — that any theory that does not have space-time will be empirically incoherent.
    — Amanda Gefter, Quanta Magazine, 25 Sep. 2024

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