How to Use prime number in a Sentence

prime number

noun
  • Count through the series of prime numbers.
    — Literary Hub, 16 Jan. 2026
  • The year 2027 will be a prime number.
    — Manon Bischoff, Scientific American, 10 Jan. 2026
  • But are there other n’s for which the result is a prime number?
    — Manon Bischoff, Scientific American, 17 Jan. 2025
  • Not all prime numbers work out that way, but the rare ones that do are called Mersenne primes.
    — Margherita Bassi, Smithsonian Magazine, 23 Oct. 2024
  • It can also be used to generate a prime number.
    — Manon Bischoff, Scientific American, 10 Jan. 2026
  • And one of those 10 questions was if there is a pattern in prime numbers.
    — Lynette Rice, Deadline, 5 Mar. 2025
  • Gaussian primes are prime numbers that can’t be written as a sum of two perfect squares.
    — Dave Linkletter, Popular Mechanics, 9 Aug. 2019
  • There's also a fear of the prime number called triskaidekaphobia.
    — USA TODAY, 29 Jan. 2024
  • The typical notion of a prime number doesn’t make sense for finite fields.
    — Quanta Magazine, 26 Sep. 2019
  • Rather than guess a six-letter word, the goal of Primel is to guess a five-digit prime number in just six tries.
    — Elizabeth Berry, Woman's Day, 14 Feb. 2022
  • Like a normal prime number, these can only be divided by themselves and one.
    — Hallie Detrick, Fortune, 8 Jan. 2018
  • In reality, the prime number is large, and so are the other numbers.
    — Amir Aczel, Discover Magazine, 31 July 2013
  • On Prime day, addresses that contain a prime number may water.
    — Star Tribune, 30 July 2021
  • Its strength lies in the difficulty of factoring large prime numbers.
    — Ofer Lidsky, Forbes, 22 Nov. 2024
  • The twin primes conjecture concerns pairs of prime numbers with a difference of 2.
    — Wired, 29 Sep. 2019
  • The zeta function has long been known to govern the distribution of prime numbers.
    — Erica Klarreich, Quanta Magazine, 8 Jan. 2025
  • This year a team identified a new approach for finding undiscovered prime numbers.
    — Clara Moskowitz, Scientific American, 19 Dec. 2025
  • Groups that have no normal subgroups are called simple groups and cannot be broken down any further, just as prime numbers can’t be factored.
    — Leila Sloman, WIRED, 6 Oct. 2024
  • Groups that have no normal subgroups are called simple groups and cannot be broken down any further, just as prime numbers can’t be factored.
    — Leila Sloman, Quanta Magazine, 6 Sep. 2024
  • If correct, then the placement of prime numbers along the number line never deviates too much from the prime number set.
    — Manon Bischoff, Scientific American, 1 July 2024
  • What are the prime numbers that multiply together to make 667?
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 6 Dec. 2019
  • And when the parties return to the real world and talks turn to a sequel, expect to see a lot of zeroes behind a prime number or two.
    — Borys Kit, The Hollywood Reporter, 4 Aug. 2023
  • The background software running on the computer unearthed a rare kind of prime number called a Mersenne prime.
    — Valencia Prashad, New York Times, 26 Jan. 2018
  • In the case of the integers, the prime ideals are sets of multiples corresponding to each of the prime numbers, along with zero.
    — Konstantin Kakaes, Quanta Magazine, 20 May 2026
  • One thing and like, easy way to screw these large language models up is ask them about prime numbers, things that human beings can understand pretty well.
    — Fortune Editors, Fortune, 25 May 2023
  • The hope was to hear a succession of uniform pulses or perhaps a numbering system, like a series of prime numbers.
    — Matt Blitz, Popular Mechanics, 30 Apr. 2018
  • The work not only broke the previous record, which had stood for 80 years, but led to new results about the distribution of prime numbers.
    — Jordana Cepelewicz, Quanta Magazine, 16 Dec. 2024
  • Since each prime number can only be divided by 1 and itself, the set of all prime numbers is one example of a primitive set.
    — Quanta Magazine, 6 June 2022
  • Ed goes to the Cambridge library to find past studies on prime numbers, but all of them have been suspiciously scrubbed from the campus’ database.
    — Rebecca Iannucci, TVLine, 22 Jan. 2025
  • The fact that 97 is a prime number—divisible only by 1 or itself—is supposed to make the system more secure.
    — Eugenia Cheng, WSJ, 20 June 2018

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