How to Use secondary source in a Sentence

secondary source

noun
  • The Paris agreement can remain a secondary source of funding for mitigation and adaptation efforts.
    — Jessica F. Green, Foreign Affairs, 7 Nov. 2025
  • And so the difference between an historian [and a journalist] is the historian goes to the source; the journalist goes to the secondary source.
    — David Frum, The Atlantic, 25 Mar. 2026
  • But for my money, a close secondary source of catharsis is the midway point, when Marie and Harry’s best friend, Jess, surprisingly hit it off on a double date.
    — Julia Poe, Chicago Tribune, 18 Jan. 2026
  • Nearly 50% of professionals now have a secondary source of income, a significant increase from pre-pandemic years.
    — Sarah Hernholm, Forbes.com, 7 Sep. 2025
  • Quarantine suspect partitions, fall back to a stable snapshot or secondary source, and degrade gracefully while owners investigate.
    — Rohit Muthyala, Forbes.com, 18 Feb. 2026
  • Domestic recycling from secondary sources represents one pathway to reduce that dependency.
    — Aditya Jadhav, Interesting Engineering, 30 June 2026
  • Instead, the program appears to rely heavily on sensationalized accounts from secondary sources with no direct knowledge or relationship with him or his family.
    — Julia Bonavita, FOXNews.com, 5 Nov. 2025
  • By contrast, the surgeon general’s report relies largely on secondary sources and assumes that cancer risk rises with every sip, without identifying a threshold at which harm meaningfully begins.
    — Robert M. Kaplan, STAT, 1 Jan. 2026
  • With so little of Antisthenes’ work surviving, we are forced to rely on secondary sources—including Plato, whose writing remains essentially intact.
    — Theodore McDarrah, Forbes.com, 26 June 2026
  • The research grant recipients are in the ideation period, which includes identifying secondary sources, following storylines, and building foundational relationships.
    — Addie Morfoot, Variety, 29 Aug. 2025
  • Further down, Oliver Ekman-Larsson is a luxury on the third pair as a secondary source of offense from the backend, while Brandon Carlo is the yin to Morgan Rielly’s yang.
    — The Athletic Nhl, New York Times, 1 Oct. 2025
  • To better measure its greenhouse gas impact, Eastman has changed its life cycle assessment (LCA) data gathering methods, transitioning from a reliance on secondary sources toward collecting primary data from its suppliers, supplemented by secondary databases.
    — Sarah Jones, Sourcing Journal, 20 Oct. 2025

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