How to Use inchoate in a Sentence

inchoate

adjective
  • An inchoate plot then took shape in the form of the film’s second lead character.
    Patrick Brzeski, The Hollywood Reporter, 13 Dec. 2022
  • The language has this rawness like the inchoate thoughts of a ninth-grader.
    Amy Sutherland, BostonGlobe.com, 15 Aug. 2019
  • And inevitable that Eddie would find himself in a state of inchoate rage.
    Tony Adler, Chicago Reader, 27 Sep. 2017
  • The ground beneath their inchoate relationship shifts from scene to scene.
    Ed Stockly, Los Angeles Times, 24 Aug. 2022
  • The mood is unsettled; the structure is amorphous and inchoate.
    Philip Sherburne, Pitchfork, 25 Mar. 2026
  • The first is an inchoate sense that firms buying themselves is unnatural.
    The Economist, 31 May 2018
  • Her gift was to represent inchoate and hard-to-grasp feelings in ways that seem direct and unfiltered.
    David Salle, The New York Review of Books, 9 May 2019
  • As presented here, the links between the two are both vivid and inchoate; concrete and fuzzy; real and imagined.
    Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 17 July 2022
  • The Atlanta speech was not only the inchoate bluster of our president.
    WSJ, 21 Jan. 2022
  • The passions and dreams that drove the movement can seem inchoate, naïve, and contradictory.
    Literary Hub, 25 Sep. 2025
  • Weyerhauser would also have to scrap inchoate plans to develop the land.
    The Editorial Board, WSJ, 30 Sep. 2018
  • In any event, surveys such as these tend to undervalue the more inchoate factors in a state’s economic growth.
    Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 10 May 2021
  • Yet, even these inchoate moments deepen the music’s sense of honest confusion.
    Jon Dolan, Rolling Stone, 8 June 2026
  • Lud Heat found its way into the hands of Alan Moore, who was tinkering with inchoate ideas about murder.
    Hari Kunzru, Harpers Magazine, 27 Jan. 2026
  • Jeremy Allen White, who always seems to do inchoate torment so well, makes a fine Springsteen.
    Bilge Ebiri, Vulture, 24 Oct. 2025
  • The vision, however, was as crucial as the sound, and the vision was as yet inchoate, embryonic.
    Literary Hub, 15 Jan. 2026
  • In many narratives that involve these issues, rescuers come to the fore and women and girls remain inchoate; not so for Rao.
    Bethanne Patrick, latimes.com, 9 Mar. 2018
  • His decisions seem to follow the complex yet inchoate impulses of his character.
    Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 14 Dec. 2021
  • His music revolutionized an inchoate form of wild music that carved itself out of blues, doo-wop, and pop (among other genres).
    Lauren Le Vine, Vanities, 18 Mar. 2017
  • Sam’s consciousness as the third person will allow, channels the mouthy freedom and inchoate urgency of an unhinged post.
    Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker, 9 Aug. 2021
  • Still, an inchoate anxiety lurked behind the mania, a fleeting cognizance that for all their demands of more, nothing could ever match this.
    Elaina Plott, New York Times, 27 Oct. 2020
  • When his monstrous scheme is unleashed, crowd scenes conjure mass destruction as a plot point, the staggering loss of life as a generic and inchoate jumble.
    Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 9 Mar. 2022
  • The mixture is pounded into an inchoate mass that tugs like marshmallow, then stretched and rolled into logs under a shower of pistachios.
    Ligaya Mishan, New York Times, 2 July 2019
  • Like the yeoman boys are out in the barn, half-naked, working out, buffing up and wearing animal heads and preparing for some kind of an inchoate battle with the burghers.
    Literary Hub, 13 Nov. 2025
  • These cuts set the Pentagon back by several decades and have resulted in the system’s current inchoate status.
    Philip H. Devoe, National Review, 18 Oct. 2017
  • My own position as to the details of mutation rates and their implications for modern human origins are inchoate.
    Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 14 July 2011
  • But the fetishizing of food suggests anxiety, too, and a yearning, however inchoate, to reconnect with our origins.
    New York Times, 19 Feb. 2021
  • At the end of the song, Ye’s language becomes almost inchoate, like scat or the communication attempts of a child just learning to use their words.
    New York Times, 14 Mar. 2022
  • Muster the money troubles, the love troubles, the antic clowning, the bone-crushing despair, the inchoate longings for art or truth or just a trip to Moscow.
    Alexis Soloski, New York Times, 4 May 2018
  • And ancient practices can provide powerful inchoate benefits to their practitioners, even when the exact cause and effect may be unclear at the time.
    New York Times, 17 June 2021

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