How to Use prime mover in a Sentence

prime mover

noun
  • She was the prime mover behind the town's annual summer festival.
  • There is no reason to mention Yoko as the prime mover in this dust-up.
    — Washington Post, 25 Mar. 2021
  • There is no reason to mention Yoko as the prime mover in this dustup.
    — Amy Dickinson, oregonlive, 25 Mar. 2021
  • The lefty was the prime mover of the A's nine-run inning Sunday.
    — Henry Schulman, SFChronicle.com, 18 Aug. 2020
  • In this case, the prime mover was Germany, with French support.
    — New York Times, 25 June 2021
  • But the heart of the movie, and the prime movers of its distinctive tone, are the performers.
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 27 Dec. 2023
  • With Callwood as chair and prime mover, We Cancerve took root and grew.
    — Jonathan M. Pitts, Baltimore Sun, 31 Mar. 2024
  • Instead, focus on making your glutes and hamstrings the prime movers throughout each rep.
    — Jeff Tomko, Men's Health, 15 June 2023
  • Energy is the most critical element of life and the prime mover of all things.
    — Eric Kaufmann, Forbes, 3 Jan. 2022
  • In Shakespeare’s oddly comic tragedy, jealousy is the prime mover.
    — Helen Shaw, New Yorker, 28 Mar. 2025
  • Videos taken at the scene showed a queue of military vehicles behind the prime mover.
    — Heather Chen, CNN, 29 Aug. 2022
  • One of the prime movers in that evolution is skeptical about the current boomlet.
    — Ann Hornaday, Washington Post, 20 June 2019
  • But there were significant changes below, with Brigham Young as the prime mover.
    — Jon Wilner, The Mercury News, 19 Nov. 2024
  • Alan Stern was a prime mover behind those efforts, going all the way back to 1990.
    — Corey S Powell, Discover Magazine, 10 July 2015
  • Smith and Havens also were the prime movers behind the famed Key System railway lines.
    — George Avalos, The Mercury News, 29 Jan. 2025
  • Good journalism, for starters, involves careful vetting, and has been a prime mover of the wider Epstein saga.
    — Jon Allsop, New Yorker, 24 Apr. 2026
  • The world changed in ways that lined up perfectly for Pelé, gilding his mystique, and TV was a prime mover.
    — Kurt Streeter, New York Times, 30 Dec. 2022
  • That wasn’t true, and Rosenstein’s anger at being portrayed as the prime mover quickly forced the White House to backpedal.
    — William Saletan, Slate Magazine, 15 June 2017
  • Poor, who’s been a prime mover for Secret Stages since its inception, pointed to other factors, too.
    — Mary Colurso | [email protected], al, 16 Mar. 2022
  • Firefighters were able to save the prime mover and first trailer, but not the B trailer that was carrying a load of toilet paper.
    — Fox News, 23 Mar. 2020
  • Ema moves with a dancer’s need for constant flux and is also the plot’s prime mover, uninterested in the whys of her want and only in taking the steps to fill it.
    — Mark Olsen Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times, 13 Aug. 2021
  • Gilbert had become a prime mover of the downtown revival, and everyone wondered what his illness and lengthy convalescence would mean for the city.
    — John Gallagher, Detroit Free Press, 28 Nov. 2019
  • Trump remains the prime mover and the biggest figure in the Republican Party.
    — Chris Cillizza, CNN, 12 Apr. 2021
  • Mitchell appears to be refining that sensibility, five years later, as the prime mover behind the Calechie brand.
    — Mary Colurso | [email protected], al, 5 Feb. 2023
  • Andre, 39, is the visionary behind the project, buying the old theater and enlisting his parents as prime movers on scene.
    — Mary Colurso | [email protected], al, 12 Sep. 2019
  • The prime mover has been Leonard Leo, the society’s executive vice president.
    — Bob Egelko, SFChronicle.com, 8 July 2018
  • In the end, the only candidate who refused to release one page of one return that year was Richard Nixon, the prime mover in the chain reaction.
    — Ash Carter, Town & Country, 26 Dec. 2012
  • Freewheeling and alive with color, the show puts Taeuber-Arp in her rightful place as a prime mover among the Dadaists of wartime Zurich.
    — New York Times, 26 Nov. 2021
  • Around the same time, Kirby was the prime mover on a Thor story about a prophecy of the end of the title character’s legion of Norse gods.
    — Abraham Riesman, Vulture, 18 Mar. 2021
  • The feline films and the simulation revealed that fluid inertia is the prime mover in forming the column of liquid that rises with the tongue into the mouth.
    — John Matson, Scientific American, 11 Nov. 2010

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