How to Use terra incognita in a Sentence

terra incognita

noun
  • For the most part, these companies were treading on terra incognita.
    — Washington Post, 16 Aug. 2019
  • The idea of terra incognita exerts a powerful pull at this moment.
    — New York Times, 28 Dec. 2020
  • An army of radioastronomy projects small and large is now trying to chart this terra incognita.
    — Davide Castelvecchi, Scientific American, 26 Aug. 2019
  • That takes you into a really terra incognita of social change.
    — Clay Skipper, GQ, 18 May 2018
  • The unknown in a life is still a gigantic terra incognita toward which every soul can make its pilgrimage.
    — Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 1 Jan. 2023
  • Globe makers had traditionally left the other 90 degrees a blank terra incognita, or marked it as all ocean.
    — Michael Blanding, New York Times, 10 Dec. 2017
  • Just about the only sure bet in the knotty and complicated milieu in which fashion operates is how much remains terra incognita.
    — Jasmin Malik Chua, Sourcing Journal, 7 Nov. 2025
  • Lost in a subterranean terra incognita, the explorer might lie somewhere under track 12.
    — Megan Gannon, Popular Science, 13 Apr. 2020
  • The inner lives of adolescents are always terra incognita, especially in this unique moment.
    — Susan Dominus, New York Times, 15 May 2021
  • So even though the Pliocene gives us some general sense of the world to come, we may well be headed for terra incognita, climatologically speaking.
    — Tom Yulsman, Discover Magazine, 29 Jan. 2015
  • California was terra incognita to the tight fraternity of fliers on the East Coast and in Europe.
    — Patt Morrisoncolumnist, Los Angeles Times, 10 Jan. 2023
  • Our pilots gently deposit us, and the biologists vanish into terra incognita.
    — Richard Conniff, Smithsonian, 29 Mar. 2017
  • The acronym stands for Here Be Dragons, an old cartographer’s shorthand for terra incognita.
    — Mark Ellwood, Robb Report, 30 Jan. 2022
  • But for thousands of children my son’s age — those in kindergarten and transitional kindergarten — elementary school itself is terra incognita.
    — Los Angeles Times, 19 Apr. 2021
  • Even before statehood, in 1850, first Spain and then Mexico tried to govern their terra incognita from thousands of miles away.
    — Tribune News Service, oregonlive, 23 Sep. 2021
  • Women were long considered too burdensome to belong in terra incognita and until relatively recently were all but banned from polar travel.
    — Emily Raboteau, The New York Review of Books, 1 Nov. 2020
  • News headlines and online posts continue to refer to North Sentinel as one of the most isolated places in the world, perhaps the last true terra incognita on Earth.
    — Adam Goodheart, Smithsonian Magazine, 25 Sep. 2023
  • These women are pursuing truth writ small, personally, looking for it in daring performances — not of national heroes but of themselves, this fecund terra incognita.
    — New York Times, 10 Dec. 2020
  • But for climbers in the first half of the 20th century, limited by rudimentary tools and techniques, El Capitan was terra incognita.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 6 Dec. 2019
  • At that time the neighborhood wasn’t even residentially zoned, much less dotted with stores, and both men recall friends shaking their heads at the terra incognita of West 20th Street.
    — Christopher Bollen, Town & Country, 22 Feb. 2022
  • For most developers and investors—many of whom have made billions over their careers selling houses and condos the old-fashioned way—real estate’s potential crypto new normal is still terra incognita as well.
    — Peter Lane Taylor, Forbes, 7 May 2022
  • The logician Kurt Gödel proved the existence of such mathematical terra incognita nearly a century ago.
    — Quanta Magazine, 10 Dec. 2020
  • To most of the Taliban, Kabul is terra incognita—a cosmopolitan enclave in an otherwise rural, and deeply traditional, country.
    — Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker, 21 Feb. 2022
  • And then, Southern California was terra incognita — a new, unsettling and unsettled place that made newcomers nervous.
    — Los Angeles Times, 29 June 2021
  • Experiencing that terra incognita privately is the promise of Ultima Thule Lodge.
    — Jen Murphy, Town & Country, 18 Dec. 2020
  • Further, death is terra incognita — what happens to men after their death is unknown to the elves or possibly even to the Valar (the order of beings below Illuvatar in Tolkien’s cosmology).
    — Jack Butler, National Review, 31 Dec. 2023
  • For four decades, Libya has been largely terra incognita, a place where the outsized personality of its quixotic leader and a byzantine bureaucracy obscured an informal network of constantly shifting power brokers.
    — Frederic Wehrey, Foreign Affairs, 28 Feb. 2011

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