How to Use irreducible in a Sentence

irreducible

adjective
  • They thought the world was made up of four irreducible elements: earth, air, fire, and water.
  • But in all of those formats, the secret, irreducible unit is the act.
    — Adam Rogers, Wired, 8 Jan. 2020
  • Hill had to confront the fact that therapy is irreducible to a set of abstract tools.
    — Zachary Siegel, New York Times, 30 Nov. 2022
  • No less than the higher electric rates and lower profits, these, too, are part of the irreducible costs of climate change.
    — Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post, 23 Aug. 2019
  • At some point taste, like talent, becomes an irreducible entity.
    — Hermione Hoby, The New Yorker, 3 July 2019
  • Two identities on the run, each one fighting with his own ghost, who discover in their duel an irreducible common ground that unites them.
    — Leo Barraclough, Variety, 1 Aug. 2022
  • Slightness in such instances means irreducible.
    — Rosa Lyster, Harpers Magazine, 30 Dec. 2025
  • Slightness in such instances means irreducible.
    — Victor J. Blue, Harpers Magazine, 23 Nov. 2025
  • Good art is irreducible to attitudes, and great art demolishes them.
    — Naomi Fry, The New Yorker, 24 Mar. 2018
  • The major hurdle is that time perception is complex, irreducible, and distributed across the brain and body.
    — Josh Wilbur, WIRED, 4 June 2019
  • Because the tree should be irreducible, there is no circumstance where n2 can exist, so n2 = 0.
    — Manon Bischoff, Scientific American, 1 Mar. 2026
  • Reclaim what is unique and irreducible in these encounters—what cannot be accounted for by the systemic analysis.
    — James Parker, The Atlantic, 17 Sep. 2024
  • The irreducible essence of policing is not law enforcement itself but discretion over which laws to enforce, over how to achieve order.
    — Stuart Schrader, The New Republic, 27 May 2021
  • The result is too vast and irreducible to fully appreciate in a single reading.
    — Sam Sacks, WSJ, 17 Dec. 2021
  • The thing is defiantly irreducible, because its aims are simple and direct.
    — Vulture, 4 Apr. 2023
  • In this wise, melancholic work, the death of a child is an irreducible truth beside which all else is contingent, an iron sadness that exists at the core of everything.
    — Sam Sacks, WSJ, 24 Dec. 2020
  • Like his conception of irreducible manliness, though, the argument hasn't gone away.
    — Samuel Goldman, The Week, 3 Nov. 2021
  • The irreducible truth is that these conundrums have no definitive answer.
    — Alaska Dispatch News, 22 July 2017
  • This is a week to remember your irreducible weirdness, your unknowable messiness, your desires, your angles, your light.
    — Claire Comstock-Gay, The Cut, 7 May 2018
  • That said, some scientists are waiting for an irreducible final theory.
    — Peter Byrne, Quanta Magazine, 24 May 2013
  • What remains from Smith and Carlos’s act, however, is irreducible.
    — New York Times, 6 Aug. 2021
  • There’s a gap — or a lag, maybe — between how new technologies can reduce our personhood to data, and the irreducible facts of our bodies, our health, our need to eat and sleep.
    — Emma Goldberg, New York Times, 28 Apr. 2023
  • These are texts, finally, to read and revisit, lean, oracular, irreducible.
    — Dustin Illingworth, latimes.com, 31 May 2018
  • What has gotten so fouled up that vague symbolic fights obscure the irreducible communal basis of our prosperity and strength?
    — Greg Jackson, Harper's Magazine, 25 May 2021
  • Instead of God, what directs the evolution of each Archie seems to be an irreducible kernel of identity.
    — Laura Miller, The New Yorker, 30 Jan. 2017
  • Few irreducible principles have been evident in her political career, but one of them is the right to the pursuit of happiness.
    — Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, 11 Aug. 2021
  • The solution for these irreducible representations came to Raskin at a moment when his personal life was filled with chaos.
    — Erica Klarreich, Quanta Magazine, 19 July 2024
  • Each brought a special joy, an irreducible quirk, a unique, surprising eccentricity.
    — Mark Oppenheimer, WSJ, 24 Aug. 2018
  • Behind his performances of great men was an irreducible stillness and personal dignity.
    — Ismail Muhammad Kiese Makeba Laymon Carina Del Valle Schorske Dessa Irina Aleksander Sam Dolnick Mark Binelli Maggie Jones Rob Hoerburger Jamie Lauren Keiles Devin Gordon Jazmine Hughes Jenna Wortham Jade Chang Taffy Brodesser-Akner Kaitlyn Greenidge Reginald Dwayne Betts Rowan Ricardo Phillips Michael Paterniti Wesley Morris Anthony Giardina, New York Times, 23 Dec. 2020
  • The irreducible fact, said Annabel Thomas, founder of Nc’nean distillery, is that some kind of fuel has to boil the mash and distill the alcohol.
    — William Booth, Washington Post, 23 Mar. 2023

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