How to Use gradualism in a Sentence

gradualism

noun
  • Many haven’t learned the importance of gradualism and that change doesn’t often happen overnight.
    — Paul Rogers, Mercury News, 21 Sep. 2025
  • Who is being served by such gradualism, the shareholder or the customer?
    — Dan Neil, WSJ, 20 Jan. 2022
  • The president has instead opted for gradualism, which is a code word for soft-pedaling the sad facts.
    — Mary Anastasia O’Grady, WSJ, 13 May 2018
  • This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.
    — Fox News, 27 Aug. 2013
  • Mr Macri’s bet on economic gradualism could also be derailed.
    — The Economist, 22 Mar. 2018
  • The overwhelming message was of gradualism — both on the rate of economic improvement and the Fed’s own efforts to wind down its era of low interest rates.
    — Neil Irwin, New York Times, 15 Mar. 2017
  • But gradualism has given way to wariness in recent weeks, partly thanks to a new series of data points showing that inflation is still high and might stay elevated for some time.
    — New York Times, 14 Dec. 2021
  • This strategy allows Google—now Waymo—to pursue a different kind of gradualism.
    — Timothy B. Lee, Ars Technica, 7 Nov. 2017
  • Investors and the Federal Reserve may have grown too comfortable with gradualism — raising interest rates at a pace that is not too fast, not too slow, but just right.
    — Craig Torres, Bloomberg.com, 11 May 2017
  • And because of gradualism built into the tax code, comptrollers are just about to start feeling the full effects of the wave of defaults that started a few years ago, said Van Niewerburgh.
    — Dylan Sloan, Fortune, 25 Feb. 2024
  • The old diffusion models may be predicated on a level of smoothness and gradualism in historical and social process which are simply not feasible.
    — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 17 May 2011
  • Phyletic gradualism seems implausible in light of the genetic evidence.
    — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 23 Dec. 2010
  • Waymo's solution to the safety-verification problem has been extreme gradualism.
    — Timothy B. Lee, Ars Technica, 21 May 2018
  • Tactically, a 75 basis-point increase would be a communication shift for Powell who has preferred to telegraph moves in advance and embrace gradualism.
    — Molly Smith, Fortune, 13 June 2022
  • At critical moments, political leaders and military commanders in the West have chosen gradualism.
    — Austin Carson, Foreign Affairs, 14 Sep. 2023
  • Compare that to the follow-on conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen, where the focus was on gradualism and restraint, not striking a knockout blow as rapidly as possible.
    — David A. Deptula, Forbes.com, 16 Jan. 2026
  • Although orthodox economists grumble about Mr Macri’s gradualism, Argentine investors seem to endorse it.
    — The Economist, 18 Jan. 2018
  • The centre’s commitment to gradualism, pluralism and rationality are no match for populists’ simplistic emotional appeals.
    — The Economist, 7 Sep. 2017
  • Their goal was the immediate end to slavery, not the tepid and undeniably racist gradualism of the American Colonization Society.
    — Bennett Parten, The Conversation, 29 Sep. 2021
  • After nearly five decades in Washington, Biden is an institutionalist, a political leader who believes in consensus and gradualism.
    — Walter Shapiro, The New Republic, 17 Aug. 2020
  • Xi rejected Deng’s gradualism and the notion that China was doomed to an indefinite future of developmental imperfection and class inequality.
    — Kevin Rudd, Foreign Affairs, 10 Oct. 2022
  • Such conditions inevitably produce a recognition of the limits of gradualism among conservatives fed up with years of rearguard compromise who desire a proactive rather than an essentially defensive and recessional policy program.
    — A. Wess Mitchell, National Review, 2 Apr. 2020
  • The theory diverged from the dominant, century-long view that evolution adhered to a slow, steady pace of Darwinian gradualism, in which species incrementally and almost imperceptibly developed into new ones.
    — Jake Buehler, Quanta Magazine, 28 Aug. 2025
  • More recently, however, Macri’s gradualism and dependence on international markets to help finance this transition have run into rising interest rates in the United States.
    — The Christian Science Monitor, 16 May 2018
  • Still, our Judaism—if that’s the word for it—affirmed idiosyncrasy, worldliness, dignity, science, exegesis, law, property, gradualism, poetic license, peace, freedom, memory, and humor.
    — Jordan Castro, Harper's Magazine, 9 Jan. 2024
  • This phyletic gradualism and the scale independence of evolutionary process has been challenged, in particular from the domain of developmental biology (albeit, not all ,or even most, developmental biologists).
    — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 16 Sep. 2010
  • Burke’s focus on the social character of man, from Burke’s thoroughgoing gradualism, and from his innovative liberal alternative to Enlightenment radicalism.
    — Ramesh Ponnuru, National Review, 11 July 2019

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