How to Use tensile in a Sentence

tensile

adjective
  • What results is a tough, flat battery cell that conducts well and holds up to tensile tests in all directions.
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 22 Mar. 2021
  • Hayashi, who studies the tensile properties of spider silks, now leaves her apartment only to feed her animals.
    — The New Yorker, 27 Apr. 2020
  • There will be a 65-foot waterfall people can walk behind and a 2-acre tensile metal aviary net overhead.
    — John Wilkens, sandiegouniontribune.com, 25 June 2017
  • Helix — fine, twisted strands of high-tensile wire — makes concrete less vulnerable to wind and explosions.
    — Rick Montgomery, kansascity, 31 July 2017
  • Whataburger is testing the tensile strength of the fine line between burger genius and breakfast insanity with its latest menu item.
    — Matthew Martinez, star-telegram.com, 5 July 2017
  • Tis the season for racing a thunderstorm home from the grocery store, squishing around in wet sandals and testing the tensile strength of your favorite umbrella.
    — Jennifer Larino, NOLA.com, 25 July 2017
  • Like all the places in the body where ligaments and muscles attach to bones, overuse and tensile stress can trigger further bone growth, forming enthesophytes.
    — Beth Mole, Ars Technica, 21 June 2019
  • Its underside, however, will experience severe tensile stress as the beam deforms.
    — Eric Limer, Popular Mechanics, 27 Apr. 2018
  • Its newest project, a self-assembling table, is built of simply wood and tensile fabric, which folds into place to create a table with no more power than a little nudge from a human.
    — John Wenz, Popular Mechanics, 21 Apr. 2015
  • His novels are constructed, with intricate beauty, from images and scenes that don’t so much flow together as cling together in vibrating, tensile fashion.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 3 May 2018
  • High-speed bearings rolled into the picture, as did carbon fibers with a tensile strength higher than the best steel, but with a much lower density – fibers 4 times stronger than steel that could store 16 times more energy per pound.
    — Charles Platt, WIRED, 1 May 2000
  • Though easily pulled apart if handled individually, those strands took on tensile strength when the artist, using the French braid technique for hair, fused them together to form a coil measuring 50 feet in length.
    — Tim Smith, baltimoresun.com, 30 June 2017
  • Through such inversion, it was theorized by intellectuals such as Mikhail Bakhtin, the tensile strength of prevailing social and political conventions could be tested and, where needed, improvements made.
    — Michael Workman, chicagotribune.com, 11 July 2017
  • As more nanotubes got incorporated into the bundle, the tensile stress at failure dropped, bottoming out at somewhere around 50 GigaPascals, or less than half the strength of an individual nanotube.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 15 May 2018
  • Snelson, whose sculptures used the same design principles but were fabricated from stainless steel poles and tensile stainless steel wires, had studied with the American architect, futurist and inventor Buckminster Fuller.
    — Wendy Moonan, Smithsonian, 27 Aug. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'tensile.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: