How to Use heuristic in a Sentence

heuristic

1 of 2 adjective
  • But trust is also a heuristic, one that can be easily abused.
    — Elizabeth Lopatto, The Verge, 23 Dec. 2024
  • Teaching them about the affect heuristic couldn’t hurt either.
    — Beau River, Forbes, 20 Apr. 2023
  • The word heuristic was invoked all through the summer of 1956.
    — John McCarthy, IEEE Spectrum, 6 May 2023
  • The four modes are not a strict system of classification, but more of a heuristic tool.
    — Jennifer Ouellette, Wired, 23 July 2021
  • In this study, researchers ran heuristic queries on input gradients.
    — Aparna Dhinakaran, Forbes, 10 Sep. 2021
  • These are heuristic systems that filter based on patterns, not guarantees.
    — Camellia Chan, Forbes.com, 20 Mar. 2026
  • One of the most prevalent of these biases is the availability heuristic.
    — Elizabeth Tricomi, The Conversation, 19 Apr. 2022
  • One way of thinking, so the model said, is heuristic—a quick and dirty approach to processing information.
    — Kyle Hill, Discover Magazine, 7 Jan. 2014
  • Yet even in this case, heuristic arguments suggest an infinite number of such prime numbers exist.
    — Manon Bischoff, Scientific American, 17 Jan. 2025
  • Programmers do not craft internal structure or do smart heuristic optimizations based on their knowledge of the driving task.
    — Brad Templeton, Forbes, 30 Oct. 2024
  • The program relied on early ideas of symbolic logic, with algorithmic steps and heuristic guidance in list form.
    — John McCarthy, IEEE Spectrum, 6 May 2023
  • For now, this idea of visualizing quantum objects by means of bubbles or elastic balloons is just a fun heuristic exercise.
    — Quanta Magazine, 16 Feb. 2017
  • This is a type of heuristic, a mental shortcut that humans evolved in order to make quick and mostly accurate judgments about their environment.
    — Keith Kloor, Discover Magazine, 24 Jan. 2013
  • These often either reinforce a certain cognitive bias or a certain heuristic approach.
    — Jedidiah Alex Koh, Forbes, 7 Mar. 2022
  • The researchers also examined how the heuristic worked when additional patient health conditions were added.
    — Jim Daley, Scientific American, 20 Mar. 2020
  • The study compared the heuristic’s collective mortality rates with those of possible triage scenarios.
    — Jim Daley, Scientific American, 20 Mar. 2020
  • The do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic targets online trolls and other malicious users who harass, cyberbully or use other antisocial tactics.
    — Anastasia Kozyreva, Fortune, 21 Feb. 2023
  • Choosing to lurk, to sit back and observe for a while, is basically a heuristic and simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos that is New Twitter.
    — WIRED, 7 Nov. 2022
  • The cybersecurity industry needs to follow this heuristic model.
    — Chuck Brooks, Forbes, 12 Apr. 2021
  • Conjectures, questions, intelligent guesses, and heuristic arguments about what is probably true.
    — Alec Wilkinson, The New Yorker, 2 Mar. 2021
  • At its core, this approach employs heuristic and commonsense reasoning, leveraging past experiences to navigate present challenges.
    — Hamilton Mann, Forbes.com, 3 Apr. 2025
  • Using political trust as a heuristic to form opinions on government surveillance is a smokescreen that distracts us from potential government overreach that can infringe upon the rights of both sides of the aisle.
    — Angelica Goetzen, Scientific American, 3 June 2022
  • On the surface, the results suggest that the general heuristic about passion leading to better outcomes was born out, with those who felt passionately about the three subjects tending to score better in the exams for those subjects.
    — Pavel Krapivin, Forbes, 6 Jan. 2023
  • The nurses had unknowingly applied what is known as the authority heuristic, trusting too readily in a person in a position of responsibility.
    — Adam B. Cohen, Scientific American, 1 July 2018
  • Selective exposure is similar to something called the availability heuristic, which is thought to also play a significant role in the FCE.
    — Conor Feehly, Discover Magazine, 13 Apr. 2021
  • Similarly, a crisis situation might demand an immediate heuristic or rule-based response, followed by an in-depth analytical review after the fact.
    — Hamilton Mann, Forbes.com, 3 Apr. 2025
  • This approach ignores heuristic algorithms, which don’t have theoretically rigorous proof of their efficiency.
    — Christopher Savoie, Forbes, 8 Aug. 2022
  • The effect of the availability heuristic on pandemic-era decision-making often manifests as making choices based on individual cases rather than on overall trends.
    — Elizabeth Tricomi, The Conversation, 19 Apr. 2022
  • In testing, ZoneAlarm detected 99% of real-world phishing pages, relying both on blacklisting and on an unusual heuristic analysis technique.
    — PCMAG, 30 July 2024
  • Selective use of heuristic and systematic processing under defense motivation.
    — Kyle Hill, Discover Magazine, 2 Oct. 2012

heuristic

2 of 2 noun
  • Those heuristics are out the door with a rowing machine, though.
    — Jay Willis, GQ, 27 Mar. 2018
  • Remember, the peak-end rule is not a flaw in the brain so much as a heuristic.
    — Mark Travers, Forbes.com, 31 Aug. 2025
  • This is a terrible heuristic if you’re being chased by a bear.
    — Jonah Goldberg, National Review, 9 Aug. 2019
  • Of course, such heuristics are hardly worthless.
    — John Pavlus, Quanta Magazine, 2 Sep. 2025
  • The authors themselves treat the metaphor as a set of heuristics, not a blueprint.
    — Steve Denning, Forbes.com, 17 May 2026
  • These models absorb our heuristics, our mental shortcuts and reflect them back.
    — Tor Constantino, Forbes.com, 8 July 2025
  • But for those inclined to use heuristics to determine when to worry, Wittes is very useful.
    — Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, 11 May 2017
  • With proofs of the heuristics being hard to come by, mathematicians have adopted more modest goals.
    — Kevin Hartnett, Quanta Magazine, 2 Mar. 2017
  • Green and Daniels write that this kind of intuitive correction is a heuristic honed over years of practice and constant feedback.
    — Keith Law, Wired, 1 May 2020
  • In our field, heuristics can be used to anticipate and thwart the malfeasance of cybercriminals.
    — Ajay Jotwani, Forbes, 27 Mar. 2023
  • Asking how biology explains the flow from signals to patterns to pathways and heuristics.
    — Scott Hutcheson, Forbes.com, 3 Sep. 2025
  • The price-quality heuristic is an economic principle that attempts to connect the price of a product to its value.
    — Steve Booren, The Denver Post, 21 Jan. 2024
  • Sean will show you how this heuristic applies to searching for the Best Stocks in the Market, looking top-down by sector.
    — Josh Brown,sean Russo, CNBC, 22 Sep. 2025
  • This gameplay provides high-level heuristics and adds human intuition to the algorithm.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 22 Oct. 2019
  • From signals to heuristics, biology shows us that large-scale leadership impact is always a cascade.
    — Scott Hutcheson, Forbes.com, 3 Sep. 2025
  • To navigate this cosmic design space, the team is now turning to AI algorithms and heuristics.
    — Mrigakshi Dixit, Interesting Engineering, 26 Nov. 2025
  • Signals are circuitry, patterns are code, pathways are channels, and heuristics are the rules of interaction.
    — Scott Hutcheson, Forbes.com, 3 Sep. 2025
  • The confidence heuristic explains why certainty persuades us.
    — Nick Dothée, The Atlantic, 22 Mar. 2026
  • Many entrepreneurs look at white space in a market and decide to not fill it because a heuristic that often holds true; a niche left unserviced often can’t be serviced profitably at all.
    — Alexander Puutio, Forbes, 15 Jan. 2025
  • Even a strong track record isn’t enough, because yesterday’s success can become tomorrow’s cognitive bias or aging heuristic.
    — Bydr. Corrie Block, Forbes.com, 23 June 2026
  • To cope, teams often lean on heuristics, like how inspiring the founder sounded, how quickly revenue has been doubling and how many peers appear interested.
    — Peter Doyle, Forbes.com, 26 June 2026
  • The robot hadn’t been explicitly programmed, using traditional heuristics, to make that move.
    — Hans Peter Brondmo, WIRED, 10 Sep. 2024
  • Nature relies on heuristics everywhere.
    — Scott Hutcheson, Forbes.com, 3 Sep. 2025
  • Spontaneous bursts of creativity arise from the heuristic and sometimes nonsensical logic of the human thought.
    — Joseph Dussault, The Christian Science Monitor, 8 Dec. 2017
  • Leaders frequently rely on heuristics to make choices—especially during crises.
    — Foreign Affairs, 24 Oct. 2023
  • Just like credit scores today, which are, at best, meaningful heuristics but are grossly overused, the technology sometimes became a substitute for common sense.
    — Brian Hamilton, Fortune, 1 Sep. 2025
  • Cognitive psychology has long taught us that human beings rely on heuristics (mental shortcuts) to interpret the social world.
    — Mark Travers, Forbes.com, 30 Aug. 2025
  • As a result, there is good experimental evidence to support the Cohen-Lenstra heuristics.
    — Kevin Hartnett, Quanta Magazine, 2 Mar. 2017
  • Leaders who grasp this framework will see themselves not just as managers of tasks but as architects of signals, stewards of patterns, cultivators of pathways, and guardians of heuristics.
    — Scott Hutcheson, Forbes.com, 3 Sep. 2025
  • Large LLMs may simply be learning heuristics that are out of reach for those with fewer parameters or lower-quality data.
    — Stephen Ornes, Quanta Magazine, 16 Mar. 2023

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