How to Use parabola in a Sentence

parabola

noun
  • This is achieved by flying a larger arc over the top of a parabola.
    — Stacey Leasca, Travel + Leisure, 19 Apr. 2023
  • The neighbor kids were biking up and down the street, looping in parabolas.
    — Allegra Goodman, The New Yorker, 20 Feb. 2023
  • Trump and his entourage stood to leave, his lips a parabola meeting the sides of his chin.
    — Graham Kates, CBS News, 31 May 2024
  • What’s more, with many variables there are many such parabolas, any of which can be used to correct errors.
    — Michael Greshko, Quanta Magazine, 10 Jan. 2024
  • The important thing is that this is the equation of a parabola.
    — Rhett Allain, Wired, 13 Aug. 2021
  • Johnson held her follow through and backpedaled as the ball traveled its parabola path to the rim.
    — Ben Baskin, SI.com, 31 Mar. 2018
  • Cut the resulting parabola out with a jigsaw to form the mouth of your bootjack.
    — Teddy Boxberger, Popular Mechanics, 2 Aug. 2017
  • Your eye is a parabola that focuses light, funneling it to your brain.
    — Emily Watlington, ARTnews.com, 22 July 2024
  • Haaland was not watching, either, as the ball reached the apex of its parabola and started to descend.
    — Rory Smith, New York Times, 9 May 2023
  • This curve is similar to the Gaussian bell curve, or the downward parabola.
    — Quanta Magazine, 13 Oct. 2016
  • Even the single, round headlight is a real glass parabola, rimmed in polished aluminum.
    — Fortune, 27 June 2018
  • Full weightlessness came on the fourth parabola, when everyone floated off the floor.
    — Chelsey Lewis, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 16 July 2021
  • The problem is that the arc of a player’s career follows the same parabola as Curry’s shots.
    — Ben Cohen, WSJ, 8 Oct. 2018
  • The open kitchen reflects the same color scheme — gray pans hang from a gray wall next to a dark gray refrigerator — while more desk lamps cast parabolas of light on the walls.
    — Bill Wyman Anu Kumar, New York Times, 18 Oct. 2023
  • When air resistance is very low, a projectile moves in the shape of a parabola—a type of mathematical curve.
    — Science Buddies, Scientific American, 28 May 2015
  • To brush up on algebra, a parabola is a particular type of arc that is defined by the exact curvature of its sides.
    — Maya Wei-Haas, Smithsonian, 9 Feb. 2018
  • The jump arc follows a path similar to a parabola, which is a symmetrical curve that looks like an upside-down U.
    — Allison Goldstein, Popular Mechanics, 4 Feb. 2022
  • Mike Moustakas flipped his bat to the ground and put his head down as another baseball soared through the sky, creating a parabola in the humid night air.
    — Rustin Dodd, kansascity, 22 July 2017
  • The mass splashes out toward the periphery, forming something concave—a parabola.
    — Emily Watlington, ARTnews.com, 22 July 2024
  • Every parabola has an axis of symmetry that splits the parabola into two mirror-image pieces.
    — Patrick Honner, Quanta Magazine, 24 Mar. 2023
  • But last week one of my students located the vertex of a parabola in a particularly elegant way.
    — Quanta Magazine, 23 Sep. 2021
  • In the first step, the method allows a straight line in any triangle to bend into a parabola, and then, step by step, lines transition into ever more complex curves.
    — Manil Suri, Scientific American, 25 June 2024
  • With the extra time to throw, though, Daniels was able to throw a parabola rather than a line drive, allowing everyone involved the chance to jump up after the ball.
    — David Aldridge, New York Times, 12 Oct. 2025
  • Wallmakers built the structure with four hyperbolic parabolas supported by just four footings.
    — Stefan Ionescu may 20, New Atlas, 20 May 2026
  • The cast and crew of that movie, though, was able to reset and position for the next scene between the 30-second intervals of zero-g on each parabola.
    — Robert Z. Pearlman, Ars Technica, 18 June 2020
  • The most important part of a parabola is the vertex — its highest or lowest point — and there are many mathematical techniques for finding it.
    — Quanta Magazine, 23 Sep. 2021
  • How the new method works This alternate method for solving quadratic equations uses the fact that parabolas are symmetrical.
    — Jonathan Corum, New York Times, 5 Feb. 2020
  • Pitts plans to return to Russia, and work to get monitors in the cockpit so the pilots can get even more real time feedback on how smoothly the parabolas are going.
    — Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides, WIRED, 24 July 2008
  • The ball leaves his hands immediately, seeming to travel straight up before following a tight parabola toward the basket.
    — Louisa Thomas, The New Yorker, 26 Sep. 2020
  • The effect is something like watching little kids unsuccessfully trying to work two jump-ropes at once, resulting in wriggly, out-of-sync parabolas.
    — Stephanie Zacharek, Time, 14 May 2018

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