How to Use incubate in a Sentence

incubate

verb
  • The female bird incubates the eggs.
  • The cultures must incubate for five more days.
  • The virus will incubate in the body for several days before the patient experiences any symptoms.
  • Researchers incubated the cells in the laboratory.
  • The virus can incubate for between one and eight weeks.
    — Isabel Debre, Los Angeles Times, 6 May 2026
  • Or can incubate one to the point of hatching?
    — Alex Kirschenbaum, MSNBC Newsweek, 29 Aug. 2025
  • All the eggs that have hatched so far were incubated as females.
    — Sarah Kuta, Smithsonian Magazine, 4 Apr. 2025
  • Taking that time to incubate yourself to be ready for this world.
    — Essence, 1 Nov. 2023
  • Even five minutes off the nest can doom incubating eggs or chicks.
    — Bruce Henderson, charlotteobserver, 15 Feb. 2018
  • Taking time out from the rat race, allows your ideas to incubate.
    — Bryan Robinson, Forbes, 13 Oct. 2024
  • But the eagles will need to move on from incubating for that to happen.
    — Michelle Del Rey, USA Today, 3 Feb. 2026
  • The virus can incubate for days before a test will uncover it.
    — Calvin Woodward and Jill Colvin, chicagotribune.com, 2 Oct. 2020
  • The chefs and sous chefs of shuttered restaurants have taken this year to incubate new ideas.
    — Erik Oberholtzer, Rolling Stone, 8 Mar. 2021
  • Females lay one to three eggs, and both parents take turns incubating them for about six weeks.
    — Samantha Agate, Kansas City Star, 8 Apr. 2026
  • The eggs then incubate in warm sand for roughly 60 days, the agency says.
    — Fox News, 22 July 2022
  • To make the xenobots, the researchers scraped living stem cells from frog embryos and left them to incubate.
    — Katie Hunt, CNN, 29 Nov. 2021
  • The protocol required at least two eggs to be left in the nests for the local birds to incubate.
    — Paul A. Smith, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 7 Aug. 2021
  • Ginsberg assumes that there was an egg on the nest that the cranes continued to incubate.
    — Laura Schulte, jsonline.com, 31 July 2025
  • The male and female are taking turns and sometimes squabbling over who will incubate the eggs.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 8 Apr. 2021
  • Producers inject the seed strains into eggs and incubate them as the virus grows.
    — NBC News, 23 Feb. 2018
  • Mourning doves incubate their eggs for 14 to 16 days.
    — Joan Morris, Mercury News, 4 May 2026
  • Netflix was the first app available on Roku and helped incubate the business.
    — Patience Haggin, WSJ, 17 Dec. 2020
  • The eggs incubate for 60 days and crack open in the fourth week of January.
    — Erika I. Ritchie, Orange County Register, 5 Feb. 2024
  • The baby emerges from an egg incubated in its mother’s pouch for about 10 days.
    — Danielle Beurteaux, National Geographic, 26 Sep. 2019
  • Worse, there are widespread fears that the technologies incubated there may turn out to be job-killers.
    — Mark Niquette, Fortune, 12 Dec. 2025
  • Worse, there are widespread fears that the technologies incubated there may turn out to be job-killers.
    — Mark Niquette, Arkansas Online, 15 Dec. 2025
  • Both birds attend the nest, which consists of 4 to 8 eggs that are incubated for about a month.
    — Arricca Elin Sansone, Southern Living, 23 Aug. 2025
  • Polio, which took six to 20 days to incubate, stayed contagious for as many as two weeks.
    — Marc Bona, cleveland, 8 June 2020
  • The process of making a batch from scratch takes this chef 24 hours, though most of that time is spent incubating the cheese.
    — Jean Trinh, Los Angeles Magazine, 26 Mar. 2018
  • Male and female plovers take turns incubating their eggs, and this pair’s flawless changing of the guard is a healthy sign.
    — Washington Post, 17 June 2019

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