How to Use periodicity in a Sentence

periodicity

noun
  • One of these relates to the periodicity of the patterns in this universe.
    — The Physics Arxiv Blog, Discover Magazine, 13 Dec. 2023
  • The second is periodicity — a repeating path like a ball pinging back and forth between two sides.
    — Quanta Magazine, 8 Aug. 2017
  • In either case, the laser or the thread helps crystals form, but their periodicity, their patterning, is fully their own.
    — Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, Scientific American, 9 Mar. 2022
  • Such short periodicity provides strong evidence for a neutron-star origin of the event.
    — Julia Musto, Fox News, 20 July 2022
  • The model factors in everything from the height and periodicity of waves to how close pelicans fly to the ocean’s surface.
    — Gary Robbins, San Diego Union-Tribune, 28 Apr. 2021
  • Some have suggested this periodicity comes from close encounters with neighboring stars that fling comets our way.
    — Eric Betz, Discover Magazine, 21 Feb. 2020
  • This periodicity is to Webster the most exciting part of his team’s results.
    — Adam Mann, Scientific American, 7 June 2018
  • But Mendeleev was neither the first nor the last word in representing periodicity.
    — Cody Cottier, Discover Magazine, 12 Apr. 2022
  • His idea was that perturbations in the star’s motions across our line of sight that would reveal some sort of periodicity indicative of a planet.
    — Bruce Dorminey, Forbes, 19 May 2021
  • Another theory ties their periodicity to glacial eras in the distant past.
    — Cody Cottier, Discover Magazine, 2 Apr. 2021
  • It's believed that the five-year periodicity is caused by the meteoroids being trapped in a resonance with Jupiter.
    — Jamie Carter, Forbes.com, 11 Sep. 2025
  • But those hypotheses all assume that grid cells map landscapes with perfect periodicity, Ulanovsky notes.
    — Quanta Magazine, 14 Oct. 2021
  • But those models don’t predict the breakdown of periodicity in three dimensions.
    — Quanta Magazine, 14 Oct. 2021
  • Their paper demonstrates that this hierarchy is the only way to tile the plane with hats, which amounts to proving that the shape will never slip into periodicity.
    — Cody Cottier, Discover Magazine, 27 Apr. 2023
  • The latter is what a natural heart does, of course, gently pushing the blood along, and that periodicity is what results in a person’s familiar pulse.
    — Henry Petroski, WSJ, 3 Aug. 2018
  • The synchrony and the group periodicity were purely emergent products of the fireflies hanging out together.
    — Joshua Sokol, Quanta Magazine, 20 Sep. 2022
  • Proofs of quantum advantage always seemed dependent on oracles that had some kind of nonrandom structure, such as periodicity.
    — Quanta Magazine, 11 July 2022
  • This periodicity affords money a whiff of certainty—a sense that wealth and poverty are, like the positions of the planets, subject to a set of objective and universal truths.
    — Charles Duhigg, The New Yorker, 31 May 2021
  • Researchers had seen, for instance, that changing the geometry of a room could push and pull at the hexagonal grids, distorting their activity and rigid periodicity.
    — Quanta Magazine, 14 Oct. 2021
  • There are no steady beats, though various kinds of periodicity come into play, including a rat-a-tat flapping noise that Fure elicits by holding a piece of paper over an upturned subwoofer.
    — Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 6 Dec. 2021
  • Another thing that Pendlebury takes into account in his predictions is periodicity.
    — Megan Molteni, STAT, 30 Sep. 2022
  • Juneteenth demonstrates a periodicity that corresponds with the holiday every year.
    — C. Brandon Ogbunu, Wired, 19 June 2020
  • These measurements could reveal that travel through dangerous areas — such as those with more cosmic rays or dense pockets of stars — does show a kind of periodicity that could explain regular extinction events.
    — Sarah Scoles, Discover Magazine, 27 July 2016
  • Besides citations, prediction prizes, and periodicity, Pendlebury is also playing the long game.
    — Megan Molteni, STAT, 30 Sep. 2022
  • But the famous periodicity of cicada broods can set some predators up for feast-then-famine scenarios—population booms followed by food insecurity and then sudden drops in numbers.
    — Jillian Mock, Scientific American, 9 Apr. 2021
  • For the medicine prize, periodicity also shows up between discoveries of basic molecular biology and ones that lead to people actually being treated or cured of the things that ail them.
    — Megan Molteni, STAT, 30 Sep. 2022
  • Imagine chicken wire lattices layered on top of each other; these can be twisted one relative to another and form entirely new moiré scales of periodicity or non-periodicity.
    — Adrienne Bernhard, Popular Mechanics, 15 June 2023
  • But human influence is affecting the dynamics of weather systems, the periodicity of the jet stream and the moisture-holding capacity of the atmosphere.
    — Matthew Cappucci, Anchorage Daily News, 23 Aug. 2022
  • In the twentieth century, scientists realized that periodicity wasn’t determined by atomic weight; instead, what mattered was the number of protons that each atom contained in its nucleus.
    — Neima Jahromi, The New Yorker, 27 Dec. 2019
  • Through these observations, the scientists discovered the FRB does, in fact, have a periodicity similar to what had been predicted in June.
    — Jennifer Leman, Popular Mechanics, 27 Aug. 2020

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