How to Use tractable in a Sentence

tractable

adjective
  • He's a very tractable child.
  • This new approach should make the problem more tractable.
  • These problems would be more tractable if the bank had done more to slim down.
    — Washington Post, 5 Aug. 2019
  • But other coalition members have so far proven less tractable.
    — Ruth Margalit, The New Yorker, 17 June 2024
  • In which case, this will lead to problems on the fiscal side that are probably tractable.
    — CBS News, 29 Apr. 2020
  • LLMs are much less tractable, much less reliable black boxes.
    — Kate Irwin, PCMAG, 17 Sep. 2024
  • In fact, questions about the nature of possible alien languages are tractable.
    — Arik Kershenbaum, WSJ, 27 Mar. 2021
  • Is the sitter skeptical and tense, or compliant and tractable?
    — Washington Post, 25 Mar. 2021
  • The risks identified are tethered to tractable and compounding risks.
    — TIME, 24 Oct. 2023
  • Then would come the much more tractable and cognizable job of fixing ObamaCare.
    — Holman W. Jenkins, WSJ, 18 July 2017
  • On the flip side, a less tractable cat (say, one who growls or hisses when frightened) may scratch and claw her way out of your lap to avoid the procedure.
    — Dr. Rob Sharp, Country Living, 10 Mar. 2010
  • But Pask and Lamm pointed out a number of ways that the thylacine is a far more tractable system than a mammoth.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 16 Aug. 2022
  • As tens of millions of us continue to shelter in place, the most tractable of teens are feeling frustrated and anxious.
    — Lisa Boone, Los Angeles Times, 29 Apr. 2020
  • As often turns out to be the case, though, there’s One Weird Math Trick that makes the problem more tractable.
    — Chad Orzel, Forbes, 6 Oct. 2021
  • Unruly adolescent dogs—the adorable and tractable puppies of a year ago—are now testing the patience of their human caregivers.
    — Jessica Pierce, Scientific American, 26 Oct. 2021
  • Writing genomes that contain millions of nucleotides, as in bacteria and yeast, has become tractable as well.
    — Andrew Hessel, Scientific American, 10 Nov. 2020
  • But the neural code—which could also benefit AI research—is one of those problems that look less tractable over time.
    — John Horgan, Scientific American, 28 Sep. 2022
  • Anybody can ask a new question, but to ask which questions at this point in time have both impact and are tractable is actually really hard.
    — Jonathan Wosen, STAT, 4 Feb. 2026
  • Because elliptic curves are so ungovernable, number theorists look for ways to link them with more tractable objects.
    — Erica Klarreich, Quanta Magazine, 29 Nov. 2022
  • And there were, in fact, glimmers of a tractable path to better products — if Congress will provide billions of dollars to speed things up.
    — Matthew Herper, STAT, 28 July 2022
  • Maybe increasing clearance rates for serial killers is more tractable, an easier lift than bringing those numbers down.
    — Dylan Matthews, Vox, 12 Nov. 2018
  • Indeed, docile and tractable torque is this motor’s defining characteristic.
    — Tim Pitt, Robb Report, 31 May 2022
  • But trying to render the squishy c-word using tractable inputs and functions is a difficult, if not impossible, task.
    — Oliver Whang, New York Times, 6 Jan. 2023
  • Even then, the integrals tend to blow up, forcing theorists to employ myriad tricks and techniques to make the problems tractable.
    — Byadrian Cho, science.org, 30 Nov. 2022
  • This all makes for a very promising step toward a tractable system to study primate embryogenesis, but the techniques are far from perfect.
    — Kyle Orland, Ars Technica, 1 June 2023
  • Memmo will develop a unified yet tractable approach to motion generation for complex robots with arms and legs.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 1 May 2020
  • Representation is building new frameworks that encode problems in ways that make solutions tractable.
    — Joseph Byrum, Forbes.com, 23 Feb. 2026
  • After decades of mathematicians spinning their wheels, the problem suddenly seemed tractable.
    — Joseph Howlett, Scientific American, 19 May 2026
  • The corresponding symplectic spaces are more complicated than the one for a pendulum, but still tractable.
    — Quanta Magazine, 15 Apr. 2024
  • The corresponding symplectic spaces are more complicated than the one for a pendulum, but still tractable.
    — Leila Sloman, WIRED, 5 May 2024

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