How to Use lossy in a Sentence

lossy

adjective
  • It’s called lossy compression because some of the data are lost.
    — Alex Reisner, The Atlantic, 9 Jan. 2026
  • Its cousin, lossy compression, is easier to comprehend.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 21 Apr. 2021
  • In contrast, lossy audio is a compressed file format that deletes some of the original audio information.
    — Greta Cross, USA Today, 10 Sep. 2025
  • This way of distributing power is fundamentally lossy.
    — Divya Prasad, IEEE Spectrum, 26 Aug. 2021
  • This allows documents to be transformed into structured, computable representations rather than lossy text blobs.
    — Aman Mishra, Forbes.com, 20 Jan. 2026
  • However, even high-quality lossy music streaming at half that sampling rate is reproduced with more detail than most other gaming headsets.
    — Will Greenwald, PC Magazine, 6 Mar. 2026
  • However, these representations are still lossy.
    — Aman Mishra, Forbes.com, 20 Jan. 2026
  • Other formats, like PNG, do better with text, because their compression format is intended to be non-lossy.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 17 June 2025
  • Teams can try to reconstruct it with emotion tags or metadata, but the model is still reasoning over a partial, lossy representation—not the original cues.
    — Gautam Jha, Forbes.com, 26 Feb. 2026
  • Indeed, performance on some tasks, like finding variations between two genomes, actually improves when the quality scores are compressed in a lossy way, because lossy compression smooths out irrelevant variations among the quality scores, effectively removing noise from the data.
    — Dmitri Pavlichin, IEEE Spectrum, 22 Aug. 2018
  • In that environment, insulating materials that are available for the job, such as PE-CVD silicon oxide or silicon nitride, have quite a few defects that are too lossy for quantum computing applications.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 7 Feb. 2022

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