How to Use mote in a Sentence

mote

noun
  • It was crushed under the shoes of guests, so little motes of popcorn dust blew through the air.
    — Vanessa Friedman, New York Times, 14 Feb. 2018
  • Reactivate to speed back to your beacon as a mote of pure light.
    — Mike Stubbs, Forbes, 2 Mar. 2025
  • Worse yet, the first two-thirds of the picture look dim and murky, as if it had been shot through a scrim of dust motes.
    — Stephanie Zacharek, Time, 16 May 2018
  • How lonely, and how far away everything is compared to that mote of dust.
    — NBC News, 22 July 2021
  • George was nearly beyond retrieval, a tiny glint of a mote, like a wayward flea.
    — Cynthia Ozick, The New Yorker, 14 June 2021
  • At the top, a half-open door emits a cloud of sparkly dust motes or tiny stars that may at first escape your notice.
    — Roberta Smith, New York Times, 6 Feb. 2020
  • Tiny bugs float in the sun like dust motes, and there are graceful flies large enough to require a runway landing.
    — John Metcalfe, Mercury News, 4 May 2026
  • The Book of Dust is love—nostalgic, warming, pure—at first mote.
    — Katy Waldman, Slate Magazine, 18 Oct. 2017
  • At Pasteur’s command, the lights went out, save for a cone of light that revealed floating motes of dust.
    — Carl Zimmer, New York Times, 17 Feb. 2025
  • The hurricane likely would act like an air filter, trapping motes of dust in raindrops.
    — Jim Nash, The Atlantic, 18 Oct. 2017
  • Slowly, surely, one mote of black dust at a time, tires are leaving their mark on the environment.
    — Tim Stevens, The Verge, 17 Nov. 2023
  • Every dust mote, every linoleum scuff and porcelain glint has been crafted with breathtaking care.
    — The Washington Post, The Mercury News, 20 June 2019
  • The mote also features a layer of special conductive film and a thin sheet of copper.
    — Courtney Linder, Popular Mechanics, 11 June 2021
  • Vanquished enemies drop motes of light, which players race to collect and bank at a central console.
    — Aaron Zimmerman, Ars Technica, 19 Sep. 2018
  • The search for a mote of relatability has led Burt to excuse-making.
    — Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic, 4 Sep. 2025
  • There’s a Gambit-adjacent one that has players depositing motes while killing other teams.
    — Paul Tassi, Forbes.com, 30 Aug. 2025
  • That’s a lot of hardware and software smarts packed into a tiny chip that might be just one of hundreds of motes affixed to pallets across an entire warehouse.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 9 July 2025
  • The researchers may use an array of ultrasound transducers that sweep their beams across an animal’s body, hitting all the motes in turn.
    — Eliza Strickland, IEEE Spectrum, 21 Oct. 2016
  • The researchers say their prototype mote used a commercially available circuit board.
    — Eliza Strickland, IEEE Spectrum, 21 Oct. 2016
  • But the superconducting sensors could measure only the average field across the zircons, which are as small as motes of dust.
    — Paul Voosen, Science | AAAS, 22 Apr. 2020
  • Check out the mote notable player reactions to Durant's injury below.
    — Michael Shapiro, SI.com, 10 June 2019
  • Even in the narrow disk, which is less than half an inch wide, Trichoplax is so small that finding it with the naked eye is like searching for a dust mote in a gymnasium.
    — Emily Underwood, The Atlantic, 8 June 2020
  • Both of those shooters required aiming a Wii-mote as a pointer at all times, and this enabled a remarkable level of precision.
    — Sam MacHkovech, Ars Technica, 20 Feb. 2018
  • By attaching motes to many muscles and nerves, the neural dust could be used as an internal sensor network, says Maharbiz.
    — Eliza Strickland, IEEE Spectrum, 21 Oct. 2016
  • Forget the Super Mario Galaxy gimmick where a second player can aim a Wii-mote and point at shiny stars.
    — Sam MacHkovech, Ars Technica, 10 Sep. 2019
  • However, some bits of debris from the objects can exist long enough to plummet through the sky, ranging from dust-mote-sized particles to whole propellant tanks.
    — Kiona N. Smith, Space.com, 4 Jan. 2026
  • Reality was droning on as usual, with impartial sunlight streaming through a nearby window and picking out swirls of dust motes.
    — Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 16 Dec. 2019
  • This is similar in size to the icy particles in Saturn's rings, for example, and the ice is likely frozen around motes of interplanetary dust.
    — Keith Cooper, Space.com, 19 May 2025
  • Powering and recording signals from multiple motes will require new techniques and better signal processing.
    — Eliza Strickland, IEEE Spectrum, 21 Oct. 2016
  • Viruses infiltrate every aspect of our natural world, seething in seawater, drifting through the atmosphere, and lurking in miniscule motes of soil.
    — Lynn Johnson, National Geographic, 15 Apr. 2020

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