How to Use irradiate in a Sentence

irradiate

verb
  • The food was irradiated to kill any germs.
  • Utah feels like a breath of fresh air, like a bunch of light bulbs just went on, irradiating a path to the promise land.
    — Sean Keeler, The Denver Post, 24 Nov. 2019
  • So even across one of the driest and irradiated places on Earth, life can still be found.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 22 Aug. 2019
  • Where does slushy brine erupt onto the surface, and where do irradiated ice chunks sink into the depths?
    — Jay Bennett, Smithsonian Magazine, 14 Oct. 2024
  • Adams said that the solution at the time was to irradiate the tumor around his spine to give him some strength back in his lower body.
    — Kate Reilly, NBC news, 2 Jan. 2026
  • Why were pigs still so irradiated when other animals in the same habitats were not?
    — Stephen C. George, Discover Magazine, 7 Nov. 2023
  • His team added soil that had been irradiated almost five years earlier, and then closed the circuit.
    — Siddhant Pusdekar, Quanta Magazine, 1 June 2026
  • Boyd notes that the power in the beam matters but so does the material that is irradiated.
    — Deni Ellis Béchard, Scientific American, 13 Feb. 2026
  • Fractal models had been used on graphite samples before, but not irradiated ones.
    — Abhishek Bhardwaj, Interesting Engineering, 15 Aug. 2025
  • Behind it, the mountain light flowed over low-lying clouds, irradiating ski pistes on the facing valley wall.
    — Caitlín Doherty, Harper's Magazine, 2 Jan. 2025
  • Regolith that had been irradiated and cooled had three different layers.
    — Elizabeth Rayne, Ars Technica, 27 Oct. 2023
  • Scientists irradiate male flies to sterilize them, then release them by the million.
    — Gretchen Wittenmyer-Stone, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 16 June 2026
  • Because my cancer was on my left side, traditional radiation would pass through my chest wall and irradiate my heart and healthy lung.
    — The Seattle Times, 15 Oct. 2018
  • The team placed a layer of the anisotropic crystal on top of silica and irradiated the two with an electron beam.
    — Prabhat Ranjan Mishra, Interesting Engineering, 24 May 2026
  • Experts agree that nuclear deterrence is not a pure numbers game (all sides would soon just be irradiating rubble).
    — Andreas Kluth, Twin Cities, 17 Aug. 2025
  • Some of them will go to a distant observer, and some of them will fall into the disk, irradiate the disk, and then bounce off and reflect into the plane of the telescope.
    — Michael Greshko, Quanta Magazine, 12 Feb. 2024
  • The contre jour lighting irradiating the sitter’s hair, her jawline and the outlines of her arms and legs while casting her face and most of her body in shadow.
    — Washington Post, 12 Oct. 2023
  • Her old home was inside the 12½-mile km irradiated exclusion zone.
    — Reuters, NBC news, 22 Dec. 2025
  • When a man hiding in a fridge is swept by this overpressure wave, he’ll certainly be battered to death inside a tumbling, irradiated oven.
    — Joe Pappalardo, Popular Mechanics, 2 Apr. 2018
  • Researchers want to irradiate the animal to kill off these microbes before giving the furry babe an autopsy and putting it up for display.
    — Joseph Calamia, Discover Magazine, 21 June 2010
  • This water has, thankfully, done its job of keeping the reactors cool, but it has become irradiated in the process, meaning it can’t just be flushed away.
    — Chris Baraniuk, WIRED, 18 July 2023
  • These seeds would remain in the body either temporarily or permanently, with the goal of irradiating the area at a low dose over a long period of time.
    — Behzad Ebrahimi, Discover Magazine, 5 Jan. 2024
  • In the testing phase, Weigand’s team even had one of the processors irradiated to 292 krad(Si).
    — Jacek Krywko, Ars Technica, 11 Nov. 2019
  • For more advanced cancer or tumors that are inoperable or not able to be irradiated, chemotherapy has been the standard treatment of decades.
    — Benjamin Leach, Verywell Health, 23 Aug. 2023
  • In a cylinder, however, irradiating from only one direction would result in an uneven pattern confined to a single side.
    — Kaif Shaikh, Interesting Engineering, 23 Dec. 2025
  • The sterile flies are irradiated and released en masse, designed to blanket a region experiencing an outbreak.
    — Evan Bush, NBC news, 7 June 2026
  • The beam enters the patient in pulses, irradiating the tumor layer by layer, much as a 3-D printer operates.
    — Bonnie Berkowitz, chicagotribune.com, 14 Mar. 2018
  • In this process, electrons irradiate the substrate at precise locations, solidifying the gas.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 22 Nov. 2017
  • Like potatoes, conventional ginger is irradiated and treated to stop it from sprouting at the supermarket.
    — Sharon Tregaskis, Good Housekeeping, 29 July 2018
  • Cancer cells overproduce certain kinds of proteins and amino acids fluoresce in the UV spectrum when irradiated.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 24 Nov. 2023

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