How to Use reverse engineer in a Sentence

reverse engineer

verb
  • The most compelling applications don’t try to reverse engineer what colleges want.
    — Liz Doe Stone, Forbes.com, 14 Aug. 2025
  • The approach amounts to reverse engineering through simulation.
    — Hanna Wickes, Kansas City Star, 19 Feb. 2026
  • Separately, a group of hackers was able to successfully reverse engineer many parts of the MetroCard.
    — Elisabeth Buchwald, CNN Money, 28 Dec. 2025
  • In all, there’s no smoking guns here, but the leak provides an intriguing peek behind the curtain — as well as easy fodder for any competitors looking to reverse engineer the company’s tech.
    — Frank Landymore, Futurism, 1 Apr. 2026
  • To demonstrate their finding, the scientists reverse engineered rectangular blocks of synthetic sole with distinct pitches.
    — Joseph Howlett, Scientific American, 25 Feb. 2026
  • With the benefit of hindsight, agencies would very likely reverse engineer a need for anonymity for police officers whose duties do not actually demand such secrecy.
    — Charles Ford Champion, Mercury News, 9 Sep. 2025
  • The bright Infrared shade has been reverse engineered by comparing both ’91 originals and 2000 retros to fine-tune the specific shade.
    — Riley Jones, Footwear News, 17 Jan. 2026
  • Upgrades can include gearboxes reverse engineered to more exotic 993 RS transmissions.
    — Basem Wasef, Robb Report, 4 Feb. 2026
  • The initiative looked a lot like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, but reverse engineered to expand the Kremlin’s authority rather than diminish it.
    — Tetiana Kotelnykova, The Atlantic, 22 Oct. 2025
  • The film contends there has been an 80-year cover-up of the existence of non-human intelligent life and a secret war among major nations to reverse engineer UFO technology.
    — James Hibberd, HollywoodReporter, 16 Oct. 2025
  • But that other supplier would have to try to reverse engineer that particular dye—formulas for dyes and colorants were, in spite of being in service to the war effort, still proprietary—and backward engineering color from a finished product is a crapshoot.
    — Literary Hub, 2 Apr. 2026
  • But that other supplier would have to try to reverse engineer that particular dye — formulas for dyes and colorants were, in spite of being in service to the war effort, still proprietary — and backward engineering color from a finished product is a crapshoot.
    — Kory Stamper, Big Think, 31 Mar. 2026
  • The adaptation was always going to invite comparisons to the original, of course, and the producers’ instincts to try to replicate its format and sensibilities wholesale to reverse engineer its success are understandable.
    — Hershal Pandya, Vulture, 23 Mar. 2026
  • That’s like asking a microelectronics engineer to reverse engineer the architecture, microcode, and operating system running on a state-of-the-art processor without the use of a digital logic probe, which would be a virtually impossible task.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 28 May 2022
  • Researchers have developed a new method to reverse engineer molecules — groups of atoms that make up nearly every physical material, including medications and batteries — using generative AI, according to a new paper published in Nature.
    — Rachyl Jones, semafor.com, 23 Jan. 2026
  • Vaikunthan Rajaratnam, a nerve surgeon and UNESCO chair partner, claimed in a LinkedIn article, however, he’s been working to reverse engineer ChatGPT to actually sound like him.
    — Sydney Lake, Fortune, 9 Sep. 2025

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