How to Use instrument in a Sentence

instrument

1 of 2 noun
  • Do you play any instruments?
  • The piano was his favorite musical instrument.
  • This is my instrument, so to speak.
    — Brenton Blanchet, PEOPLE, 4 Apr. 2026
  • No instruments, no stems — just one dense block of sound.
    — Alma Rota, Rolling Stone, 14 Oct. 2025
  • The suona is a squeaky instrument.
    — Sheila Regan, Twin Cities, 27 Feb. 2026
  • And all the instruments are, too.
    — Stephen Clark, ArsTechnica, 12 Sep. 2025
  • Use your voice as an instrument.
    — Alphonse Pierre, Pitchfork, 6 Feb. 2026
  • Some set out to learn an instrument or a new language or two.
    — Steve Lopez, Los Angeles Times, 4 Nov. 2023
  • When someone makes an instrument by hand, there is nowhere to hide.
    — Richard P. Weigand, Rolling Stone, 22 Apr. 2026
  • The instruments will be laid in their soft cases.
    — Literary Hub, 10 Apr. 2026
  • Wong and Dart took their instruments to the front desk and asked to check them.
    — Zach Helfand, The New Yorker, 18 Dec. 2023
  • Four men, clad in white with black turbans, face a pile of instruments on fire.
    — Vidushi Mishti Sharma, Rolling Stone, 24 Oct. 2025
  • The cello, for me, was still the main instrument, and just a core sound of the show.
    — Amon Warmann, Variety, 25 May 2023
  • Then add some instruments such as a toy guitar or set of drum sticks plus some hats and hip shades.
    — Deborah Way, Parents, 6 Oct. 2023
  • Gloria also picked up the instrument as a way to help her son.
    — Kaitlin Stevens, Peoplemag, 27 Jan. 2024
  • The process is like learning an instrument.
    — James Marcus, New Yorker, 3 Nov. 2025
  • And what a voice — what an instrument of razing and of raising.
    — Sara Holdren, Vulture, 20 May 2026
  • After all this time, instruments remain a key part of our lives.
    — Thania Garcia, Variety, 11 July 2023
  • So many aspects of the world packed into their instruments, in this hour.
    — Literary Hub, 9 Mar. 2026
  • Rosi shows us cranes and other instruments churning away, with no one in sight.
    — Bilge Ebiri, Vulture, 6 Mar. 2026
  • Now my purpose is to transform lives with that same instrument.
    — Leila Cobo, Billboard, 15 Oct. 2025
  • The harp is not an instrument of slyness, wryness, or the earth.
    — Emma Madden, Pitchfork, 28 Apr. 2026
  • They’d been severed from the body by some sort of cutting instrument.
    — Nate Gartrell, Mercury News, 4 Mar. 2026
  • Webb said his instruments can reveal whether the soil has been disturbed.
    — Daniel Wilkerson, CBS News, 30 June 2026
  • The crater might have been too small for it or its blast zone to be imaged by current instruments.
    — Elizabeth Rayne, Ars Technica, 5 Nov. 2023
  • None of them were holding instruments; some were sprawled on the ground, laughing over him.
    — Julyssa Lopez, Rolling Stone, 29 May 2023
  • The instrument of her destruction is not the train.
    — Literary Hub, 23 Sep. 2025
  • The bus driver returned his instrument just in time.
    — Maggie Penman, Washington Post, 22 May 2026
  • But their instruments may surprise you.
    — Jessica Meszaros, Miami Herald, 8 Apr. 2026
  • Congress was unswayed by the change in taxing instruments.
    — Joseph Thorndike, Forbes.com, 26 May 2026

instrument

2 of 2 verb
  • Lock the change in place and instrument it heavily for a full usage cycle.
    — Expert Panel®, Forbes.com, 29 Aug. 2025
  • More of the products that surround our lives will be instrumented for replenishment or refreshing.
    — Beth Ann Kaminkow, Forbes, 24 Jan. 2025
  • This means instrumenting for decision quality, not just system health.
    — Karan Kumar Ratra, Forbes.com, 18 Feb. 2026
  • And the cars were instrumented with cameras and GPS to record traffic conditions, behavior, and so on.
    — Jonathan M. Gitlin, ArsTechnica, 21 Aug. 2025
  • Lotus added a mass of up to 30 kilograms to each of the four wheels of a Ford Focus and instrumented the car to measure vibration and movement.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 26 June 2018
  • Attribution should then be instrumented at the source, using unique tracking links, promo codes or pixel parameters per creator.
    — Agung Dwi Sandi, Forbes.com, 22 May 2026
  • Seismologists chalked up these spurious readings to instrument errors.
    — Quanta Magazine, 4 Aug. 2025
  • That’s the gap to close—not by buying another monitoring tool, but by changing how your engineering and finance teams instrument and share signal together.
    — Satyabrat Chowdhury, Forbes.com, 1 June 2026
  • From Reactive To Proactive Most modern data stacks are instrumented with logs, metrics and traces.
    — Kiran Patibandla, Forbes.com, 11 June 2025
  • Bullerengue is a genre led mainly by elderly women, instrumented exclusively with artisan drums, and preserved through oral tradition.
    — Marjua Estevez, Billboard, 7 Nov. 2017
  • The structure Tether has built places that instrument permanently outside US oversight.
    — Zennon Kapron, Forbes.com, 28 May 2026
  • The plan is for the NFL, when the technology is ready, to offer mouth guards instrumented with such sensors to players to measure their impact response.
    — Barry Wilner, The Christian Science Monitor, 29 Aug. 2017
  • In practice, this means instrumenting high-impact decision points such as forecast overrides, scenario selections and cross-functional trade-offs with lightweight, structured context.
    — Igor Rikalo, Forbes.com, 20 Feb. 2026
  • Scientists need at least two spacecraft, each positioned in bespoke polar orbits and specially instrumented to measure magnetic fields, electric fields, electrons, and ions.
    — Stephen Clark, ArsTechnica, 24 July 2025
  • The counter-strategy is to hard-bake healthy skepticism into user behavior and to instrument Macs with the same telemetry layers enterprises already expect from Windows.
    — Kurt Knutsson, FOXNews.com, 12 May 2025
  • Unlike earthquake prediction — which in terms of short-term prediction is currently not feasible and may never be feasible on a short timescale — volcano prediction is feasible and is common if volcanoes are instrumented.
    — NBC News, 23 May 2018
  • Product events are instrumented at meaningful granularity, joined with firmographic and intent data and assembled into an account-level signal layer that downstream systems can act on.
    — Varun Milind Kulkarni, Forbes.com, 12 June 2026
  • FlexFoil and the aircraft were again fully instrumented by NASA to record flight conditions and measure how well the technology endured high wind speeds, low temperatures, and sudden changes in air pressure.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 31 Aug. 2016

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