How to Use proliferate in a Sentence

proliferate

verb
  • This leaves weak spots where rust can form and proliferate if not treated.
    — Christopher McFadden, Interesting Engineering, 5 Apr. 2026
  • As hate crimes proliferate, there’s a growing push to shine a light on bigotry.
    — Patrik Jonsson, The Christian Science Monitor, 23 Feb. 2022
  • Over the course of hours, these cells might be able to proliferate to levels high enough to make someone sick.
    — Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 26 June 2019
  • New research shows the zombies may proliferate in a warmer world.
    — Matt Simon, Wired, 19 May 2021
  • Sure, Imgur helped memes and visual jokes proliferate across the web.
    — Chris Velazco, Washington Post, 16 May 2023
  • And yet, of course, these groups do continue to proliferate!
    — Literary Hub, Literary Hub, 7 May 2026
  • The devices proliferated across the state under a murky area of the law.
    — Jack Harvel, Kansas City Star, 21 Mar. 2026
  • As the cells grow and proliferate, the team changes the recipe of the liquid nutrients to boost growth.
    — Jenny Splitter / Photography Kelsey McClellan, Popular Mechanics, 20 Dec. 2019
  • Burmese pythons have since proliferated in the state’s muggy warmth.
    — Longreads, 25 Oct. 2024
  • But as the number of these housing projects has proliferated, so have the rules.
    — San Diego Union-Tribune, 1 Sep. 2019
  • In the time that resale options have been proliferating, so have new clothes.
    — Marc Bain, Quartzy, 16 Aug. 2019
  • With mass numbers of sea stars dead, the urchins proliferated, chomping their way through the kelp forests.
    — Brigit Katz, Smithsonian, 26 Oct. 2019
  • But fact can be as strange as science fiction and this zany plot is unfolding around the world as sea urchins proliferate.
    — Smithsonian, 21 Sep. 2019
  • Their bark is ridged and furrowed, giving insects room to proliferate.
    — Sophie Hartley, IndyStar, 29 Oct. 2025
  • These kinds of bans have proliferated.
    — Elizabeth Weise, USA Today, 21 Feb. 2026
  • And slang used to denigrate women—such as bop or for the streets—has proliferated.
    — Molly Langmuir, The Atlantic, 25 Sep. 2025
  • The jokes that proliferated did not seem to be working through a singular grief.
    — Lauren Michele Jackson, The New Yorker, 27 Feb. 2025
  • Over the same period, charter schools in the city and across the state have proliferated.
    — Annie Waldman, ProPublica, 18 June 2019
  • That was the first of many lies I was forced to carry for him, the weight of which proliferated my trauma.
    — Emanuella Grinberg, CNN, 27 Aug. 2019
  • Outlets that offer less healthy fare — such as fast-food joints, liquor stores and corner stores — tend to proliferate in those deserts.
    — Courtland Milloy, Washington Post, 17 May 2022
  • Red and white English flags have proliferated along streets and been painted on roads.
    — Vitalii Yalahuzian, USA Today, 14 Sep. 2025
  • Over the next few decades, thanks to hip hop culture, streetwear proliferated into the mainstream.
    — Cecilia D'anastasio, Wired, 5 Mar. 2020
  • Over the past 100 years, those flaws have proliferated as the use of the machine has spread across the world.
    — Amit Katwala, WIRED, 2 Mar. 2023
  • Many of these proliferating jerseys are not meant to be replicas of the game gear worn by favorite athletes.
    — Leah Asmelash, CNN Money, 28 June 2026
  • The modern-day trio was slowed by traffic jams at the shopping malls that now proliferate the historic highway.
    — David Kindy, Smithsonian Magazine, 15 Sep. 2021
  • With all the data that has proliferated across the game, baseball can seem overly complex at times.
    — Sahadev Sharma, New York Times, 8 Mar. 2026
  • The image that had proliferated on social media was now part of the legal record.
    — Alessandra Schade, Time, 14 Feb. 2026
  • Tax shelters and other schemes would proliferate.
    — Steve Forbes, Forbes.com, 26 June 2026
  • Vibrio proliferates during heavy rains and floods.
    — Andrea Tamayo, Scientific American, 15 Aug. 2025
  • The ultimate hope is to remove enough purple urchins that the kelp can grow back in small patches and proliferate once again along the coast.
    — NBC News, 30 Nov. 2019

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