How to Use kelvin in a Sentence

kelvin

noun
  • And look at the number of kelvins to gauge a bulb’s color temperature.
    — Lauren Jarvis-Gibson, Charlotte Observer, 24 June 2026
  • At night, the surface of even the closest planet to the sun, Mercury, drops to about 95 kelvin.
    — Jennifer Leman, Popular Mechanics, 22 Nov. 2022
  • At higher temperatures, the cooling span reached up to 54 kelvins.
    — Neetika Walter, Interesting Engineering, 22 Jan. 2026
  • The material in the accretion disk is about a million kelvins, but the corona is a billion kelvins.
    — Michael Greshko, Quanta Magazine, 12 Feb. 2024
  • So on the kelvin scale, the processor is 180 times colder than the temperature of space.
    — Scientific American, 1 Dec. 2017
  • Four out of the seven base units within the SI will be changed in total, including the ampre, the kelvin, and the mole.
    — David Grossman, Popular Mechanics, 20 May 2019
  • At the temperatures of our experiments, three kelvins up to 10 kelvins, this material is very much in the strange metal regime.
    — Douglas Natelson, Scientific American, 19 Mar. 2024
  • Along with the kilogram, the ampere (the unit of electric current), kelvin (temperature) and mole (amount of a substance) will get new definitions.
    — Clara Moskowitz, Scientific American, 1 Nov. 2018
  • Inside the sun, where nuclear fusion occurs, temperatures can swell to 15 million kelvin.
    — Jennifer Leman, Popular Mechanics, 22 Nov. 2022
  • To do it, the researchers trapped deuterium ions in a cage of electric fields, flushed them with hydrogen gas and cooled everything down to an extremely chilly 15 kelvins.
    — Elise Cutts, Scientific American, 4 Apr. 2023
  • Color temperature addresses a unit of measurement called degrees kelvin.
    — Popular Science, 15 Apr. 2020
  • Google’s device operates at 4 kelvins inside the refrigerator, just slightly warmer than the qubits that are about 50 centimeters away.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 22 Jan. 2021
  • At room temperature, the system produced a temperature drop of nearly 30 kelvins in just 20 seconds.
    — Neetika Walter, Interesting Engineering, 22 Jan. 2026
  • But Spitzer used passive methods—reflective materials and radiators to shed heat into space—to cool most of the spacecraft to 40 kelvins.
    — Daniel Clery, Science | AAAS, 23 Jan. 2020
  • These regions remain in permanent darkness and experience temperatures close to 50 kelvins.
    — Neetika Walter, Interesting Engineering, 18 May 2026
  • These bubbles are incredibly hot, with the plasma that makes up the Fermi bubbles reaching more than a million kelvins (nearly 2 million degrees Fahrenheit).
    — Brandon Specktor, Space.com, 10 Aug. 2025
  • Lightforce takes special care to ensure its driving lights operate at 5,000 kelvin, which should be considered an ideal color temperature.
    — Wes Siler, Outside Online, 18 Aug. 2020
  • Within the narrow, high electric current at the core of the lightning channel, temperatures rise to tens of thousands of kelvins almost instantaneously, producing a highly ionized column of hot gas.
    — Encyclopedia Britannica, 12 Mar. 2026
  • The second challenge was to ensure the detectors worked properly by achieving a temperature of 7 kelvin (266º C below freezing).
    — Dhananjay Khadilkar, Ars Technica, 10 Aug. 2022
  • The review concerns a potential redefinition of the ampere (a unit of electricity), the kelvin (temperature), the mole (measurement of atoms and or molecules) and the kilogram.
    — David Grossman, Popular Mechanics, 20 Oct. 2017
  • Among them is a liquid metal pump capable of operating above 1,473 kelvins (1,200 degrees Celsius).
    — Georgina Jedikovska, Interesting Engineering, 12 Nov. 2025
  • For deuterium-tritium fusion reactions, plasmas must be heated to an optimal temperature of around 13 keV (150 million kelvin).
    — Prabhat Ranjan Mishra, Interesting Engineering, 2 Jan. 2026
  • In each device, a 40-nanometer-wide niobium titanium nitride wire was cooled to about 2 kelvins (about –271 °C), rendering the wire superconductive.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 1 Feb. 2024
  • Although such devices operate at temperatures of about 4 kelvins, or 4 degrees above absolute zero, Manheimer says supplying the refrigeration is now a trivial matter.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 24 Feb. 2016
  • Decades of research has yielded an assortment of materials that superconduct at temperatures as high as -140 °C (133 kelvins) at ambient pressure.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 26 June 2025
  • For example, cooling these classical servers down to the temperatures needed for quantum computers (1 kelvin or -272 °C) wouldn’t make the computers hyperefficient.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 16 Nov. 2023
  • Even after over 100 hours at temperatures of up to 1,000 kelvins, the membranes maintained their stability and hydrogen separation efficiency.
    — Mrigakshi Dixit, Interesting Engineering, 2 Oct. 2025
  • Among these was cooling conventional silicon DRAM down to 77 kelvins and designing a glass bridge between the 77-K section and the main superconducting section.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 15 May 2024
  • For one thing, the material seems to act suspiciously like a cuprate, a type of exotic ceramic in which superconductivity can occur at temperatures up to about 140 kelvin, or halfway between absolute zero and room temperature.
    — David H. Freedman, WIRED, 5 May 2019

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