How to Use life-form in a Sentence

life-form

noun
  • If they are broken by clumsy feet, these millennia-old life-forms can die.
    — Simon Willis, Travel + Leisure, 5 Oct. 2025
  • And now the tech-bro leader of Prodigy City wants those life-forms for himself.
    — Bethy Squires, Vulture, 5 Aug. 2025
  • The earliest plantlike organisms were simple, tiny green life-forms such as algae.
    — Erin Potter, The Conversation, 16 Mar. 2026
  • But by tweaking this archetype again and again, Chan transforms a cheap gimmick into a complex ecosystem of life-forms.
    — Dawn Chan, The New York Review of Books, 25 Apr. 2026
  • Not only is it filled with hostile life-forms, but the planet itself is a shape-shifter — meaning its geography changes with each new mission.
    — ABC News, 24 Apr. 2026
  • This process contributed to the emergence of many diverse and complex eukaryotic life-forms on Earth.
    — Encyclopedia Britannica, 18 June 2026
  • But some suspect that earlier, simpler life-forms that predate even this common ancestor may have run on a leaner chemistry.
    — Jacek Krywko, Scientific American, 30 Apr. 2026
  • There was SimEarth in 1990, in which the player tunes a planet’s atmospheric conditions, sculpts its landmasses, plunks down life-forms.
    — Eric Boodman, Vulture, 25 Mar. 2026
  • Plants occupy the base of Earth's food webs and are consumed directly or indirectly by all higher life-forms, thereby functioning as the major source of food for humans and other animals.
    — Encyclopedia Britannica, 2 Apr. 2026
  • Many histories of invasive species concern the life-forms that have been intentionally or accidentally introduced from Europe.
    — Matthew Wills, JSTOR Daily, 22 June 2026
  • His research team came up with a framework that, instead of looking for a specific type of life-form, looks at patterns in collections of chemicals and evaluates whether they could have been produced by processes like metabolism and evolution.
    — Mary Magnuson, The Conversation, 20 Mar. 2026
  • Each of these creatures of light multiplied into subqueries and side queries, a glowing menagerie of exotic life-forms crisscrossing the void, their wakes and ripples gradually illuminating the entirety of the submarine cave.
    — Big Think, 14 Oct. 2025
  • Postnature, then, demands a subjectivity that is plural and decenters the human; a postnatural ethics seeks to blur the boundaries between human and nature, crafting new metaphors for the permeability and porousness of life-forms.
    — Catherine Taft, Artforum, 1 Feb. 2026
  • By applying engineering principles to biology, and with the help of some nifty robotic equipment, Ginkgo has created a factory for churning out exotic life-forms, the likes of which have never before been seen on this planet.
    — Eliza Strickland, IEEE Spectrum, 29 Nov. 2016
  • That research, published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, found nearly five times more individual life-forms per square meter on the munition objects than on nearby sediment.
    — Andrea Tamayo, Scientific American, 25 Sep. 2025
  • Hundreds of fossils uncovered in southern China’s province of Yunnan reveal that at least some of the life-forms scientists had thought arose in the Cambrian period were alive and thriving millions of years earlier, in an era known as the Ediacaran period.
    — Jackie Flynn Mogensen, Scientific American, 2 Apr. 2026
  • When an iceberg the size of Chicago broke away from an Antarctic ice shelf on January 13, Schmidt Ocean Institute scientists raced over in their Falkor (too) research vessel to glimpse what life-forms had been dwelling below.
    — Andrea Thompson, Scientific American, 25 Dec. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'life-form.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: