How to Use perturbation in a Sentence

perturbation

noun
  • On the backside of the moon there had been some venting--some perturbations unknown to us.
    — Jennifer Bogo, Popular Mechanics, 18 July 2019
  • The system has determined that’s a spot that wouldn’t hold up well to perturbations.
    — Matt Simon, WIRED, 13 July 2018
  • And the brain is an especially noisy system, so there would be many such perturbations.
    — Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 7 June 2019
  • The presence of a planet causes a tiny perturbation in the lensing of light from the background star.
    — Robert Lea, Space.com, 24 June 2026
  • One is to use subtle perturbations that make the sign look weathered to a human observer.
    — Jonathan M. Gitlin, Ars Technica, 1 Sep. 2017
  • If a perturbation were to jostle this fluid, a gravity wave would result.
    — Matthew Cappucci, Washington Post, 6 Apr. 2018
  • Sometimes it’s used loosely to describe any large, sudden change that arises from small perturbations.
    — Gregory Barber, Quanta Magazine, 15 Sep. 2025
  • Calculating perturbations for many different grasps on just one spray bottle takes a whole lot of brain power.
    — Matt Simon, WIRED, 13 July 2018
  • His team also discovered that pigeon’s feathers could filter out a lot of turbulence perturbations on their own.
    — Ars Technica, 27 Nov. 2024
  • With any change in leadership, there will be obviously some minor perturbations.
    — CBS News, 15 Jan. 2020
  • Where the ring particles are shoved together because of perturbations by moons, the particles have to go somewhere.
    — Stav Ziv, Newsweek, 6 Sep. 2017
  • The enormous perturbations in soil, water and air leave clear chemical signatures.
    — Jan Zalasiewicz, Scientific American, 1 Dec. 2016
  • That was long enough for the spacecraft to have recorded any faint perturbations a faraway planet could induce in Saturn’s motion around the sun.
    — Lee Billings, Scientific American, 22 Mar. 2018
  • The mechanisms of this polar perturbation are not yet fully understood.
    — Robin Andrews, Wired, 22 Feb. 2022
  • The researchers realized that quakes sometimes didn’t leave telltale perturbations.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 22 June 2021
  • That perturbation becomes much more complicated when many large particles are released at once, each with its own wake that affects its neighbors.
    — Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 21 Jan. 2025
  • The perturbations in the magnetic field were similar to what astronomers have observed around objects with thin atmospheres.
    — David Grossman, Popular Mechanics, 17 Feb. 2017
  • Not according to MacLeod, who pointed out that how much of a perturbation occurs depends on the star-to-planet mass ratio.
    — Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 3 May 2023
  • Granting all perturbation and backsliding, generous lives had been lived on that fecund soil, and a generous spirit inhered in it.
    — Marilynne Robinson, The New York Review of Books, 12 Oct. 2023
  • Equally important is a resilient mindset, one that treats perturbations as inevitable rather than calamitous and resists the urge to overreact.
    — Michael J. Mazarr, Foreign Affairs, 6 Dec. 2013
  • Olivero says climate change perturbations continue to concern the winery.
    — Michelle Williams, Forbes, 21 Feb. 2025
  • Because of these perturbations, an object behind the lensing galaxy is magnified, although often in a somewhat warped way.
    — Elizabeth Rayne, Ars Technica, 19 Dec. 2023
  • One prominent candidate for a brain signature of consciousness is its response to a perturbation.
    — Anil Seth, Wired, 20 Dec. 2021
  • To identify the quantum states of a particle, scientists need to isolate it from perturbations arising from its surroundings.
    — Ameya Paleja, Interesting Engineering, 8 Aug. 2025
  • Evidence is accumulating that the gut microbiome, and perturbations in it, can affect behavior—at least in mice.
    — Diana Gitig, Ars Technica, 27 Oct. 2019
  • The what, when, and where of these immunological assaults are all crucial to the body’s ability to waylay disease; any perturbation threatens to set the whole system askew.
    — Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic, 15 Apr. 2021
  • But otherwise the climate, through its perturbations, has maintained conditions conducive to animal life for nearly a half-billion years.
    — Peter Brannen, Quanta Magazine, 15 Sep. 2025
  • Jia used measurements from Galileo’s magnetometer to seek out small perturbations in the magnetic field during the closest flyby.
    — Ramin Skibba, Scientific American, 14 May 2018
  • The atmosphere is too complicated, too fragile, too sensitive to small perturbations, to submit to the equations with the precision of planets or stars.
    — Hannah Fry, The New Yorker, 24 June 2019
  • Quantum machines of today are prone to errors, have a restricted size range, and are sensitive to perturbations in their surrounding environment.
    — Chuck Brooks, Forbes.com, 29 Aug. 2025

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