How to Use irrational in a Sentence

irrational

1 of 2 adjective
  • She had an irrational fear of cats.
  • He became irrational as the fever got worse.
  • Those sorts of things are irrational to me.
    — CBS News, 15 Feb. 2026
  • Does that not leave room for the irrational?
    — Lauren Michele Jackson, New Yorker, 5 Oct. 2025
  • And so the fear is not irrational.
    — Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, 30 Jan. 2026
  • But why are these fears irrational?
    — Christopher Elliott, USA Today, 4 Nov. 2025
  • Trump isn’t just irrational about this.
    — Chris Brennan, USA Today, 15 Jan. 2026
  • Does pot make users irrational?
    — Morgan Marietta, The Conversation, 26 June 2026
  • And while crowds may be irrational, the study of crowds is a science.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 27 Dec. 2023
  • Like to me, acting is an irrational act.
    — Los Angeles Times, 26 May 2026
  • Well, so what if there’s something irrational in it?
    — Lauren Michele Jackson, New Yorker, 5 Oct. 2025
  • What seems irrational may be your truest calling.
    — Rolling Stone Culture Council, Rolling Stone, 12 Aug. 2025
  • This is far from an irrational worry.
    — Rebecca Boyle, The Atlantic, 18 Feb. 2026
  • Art gives us a place to be irrational, be wild, be an animal.
    — Nathan Biehl, Hazlitt, 20 July 2022
  • What’s irrational is to pretend that such risks do not exist.
    — James Freeman, WSJ, 9 Mar. 2022
  • And these irrational likes and dislikes make watching sports more fun.
    — Alexis Coe, Rolling Stone, 16 Nov. 2025
  • Your wife has an irrational aversion to rubber band germs.
    — John Hodgman, New York Times, 29 May 2026
  • The reflex, from a distance, is to call this irrational.
    — Tyler Evans, Sun Sentinel, 28 June 2026
  • None of this is irrational on the employee's part.
    — Vibhas Ratanjee, Forbes.com, 15 May 2026
  • That irrational choice, born of struggle and longing, changed my life.
    — Sudhir Gupta, Rolling Stone, 7 Oct. 2025
  • Sometimes, what appears to be an irrational fear may very well be a gut instinct.
    — Annie Lane, oregonlive, 21 Oct. 2021
  • What irrational thinking this new mayor has shown!
    — Voice Of The People, New York Daily News, 27 Feb. 2026
  • But sometimes the thoughts our brains come up with are distorted and irrational.
    — Pascal Bornet, Forbes, 22 Feb. 2023
  • Our worries are often dismissed as irrational—planes are much safer than cars, etc.
    — Elaine Godfrey, The Atlantic, 6 Aug. 2025
  • Panic will drive one to irrational thought and, if unchecked, bad behavior.
    — Steve Meyer, Anchorage Daily News, 9 Jan. 2022
  • This is not exactly irrational on the part of patients.
    — Jared Rhoads, STAT, 10 Feb. 2026
  • And that started to bring in this level of despair and fear that is a little bit irrational.
    — Michael Schulman, The New Yorker, 13 Dec. 2023
  • These are clearly irrational thinkers.
    — Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New Yorker, 1 Dec. 2025
  • Great startups often look irrational at first.
    — Anna Demeo, Forbes.com, 31 May 2026
  • There was a rational way to build an economy, and there were irrational ones.
    — Jason Blakely, Harper's Magazine, 10 July 2023

irrational

2 of 2 noun
  • We are all steered by a mixture of the rational and the irrational.
    — Christopher Beha, Harpers Magazine, 5 Jan. 2021
  • To believe in the return of a long-dead child reflects the anguish of the believer and, of course, a tendency to embrace the irrational.
    — Dorothy Rabinowitz, WSJ, 29 Apr. 2021
  • Instead, mathematicians ask about the proportion of the total number of irrationals corralled by each fraction.
    — Quanta Magazine, 14 Aug. 2019
  • In the battle between the infinitely large and the infinitely small, Dirichlet had to find the right balance to prevent some irrationals from slipping through the cracks.
    — Quanta Magazine, 10 Mar. 2020
  • Attempting to appease the loudest to the detriment of the community only emboldens the irrational and silences those looking to have productive conversation.
    — Benjamin Ayanian, Star Tribune, 5 May 2021
  • These unwieldy numbers have plagued mathematicians since the ancient Greeks; indeed, legend has it that Hippasus was drowned for suggesting irrationals existed.
    — Leila Sloman, Scientific American, 16 Sep. 2019

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