How to Use tree ring in a Sentence

tree ring

noun
  • Changes in weather affect the width of each year’s tree ring.
    — Washington Post, 5 Dec. 2020
  • For those who can read them, tree rings offer a glimpse into the past.
    — Sarah Henry, AZCentral.com, 9 Nov. 2025
  • Torrents of snow can knock over, bruise, or injure trees in ways that show up on tree rings.
    — Umair Irfan, Vox, 15 Mar. 2018
  • Counting growth rings isn’t as simple as counting tree rings.
    — Cody Cottier, Scientific American, 13 Jan. 2026
  • Researchers can then count the rings like tree rings to estimate the trout’s age.
    — Darcie Moran, Freep.com, 15 Aug. 2025
  • That's going to give us the outermost tree ring that was ever formed.
    — CBS News, 11 Feb. 2018
  • Her tree rings become record and relic — proof that land was always the first archive.
    — Petala Ironcloud, New York Times, 1 May 2025
  • Some of the tree ring experts involved in the work, on the other hand, are more convinced.
    — Brian Amaral, BostonGlobe.com, 26 Aug. 2022
  • Like tree rings, dinosaur bones form concentric rings in their bone's cross-section.
    — Elizabeth Gamillo, Discover Magazine, 5 Jan. 2024
  • But that stick only goes back about 2,000 years in climate records based on tree rings.
    — Scott K. Johnson, Ars Technica, 31 Jan. 2018
  • These include things like the size of annual tree rings or the ratio of oxygen isotopes found in ice.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 14 May 2024
  • The study’s tree ring record also provides a sobering view of what is possible in the West.
    — Washington Post, 15 Feb. 2022
  • Murphy has studied megadroughts of the past using tree rings, and those droughts have lasted up to about 30 years.
    — Ian James, azcentral, 7 June 2020
  • Much like tree rings, the cones remained fairly distinct even after the animal died.
    — Carl Zimmer, New York Times, 17 Jan. 2024
  • Like tree rings, they can be used to infer developmental speeds and timing.
    — Laura Baisas, Popular Science, 13 Nov. 2024
  • And carry this imagery straight to the earth’s core, connecting your own body to the fiery, molten layers, like so many tree rings.
    — Bess Matassa, Teen Vogue, 13 Oct. 2018
  • Much like an ice core or tree ring grows season after season, the sediment at the bottom of a blue hole builds up over time.
    — J. Besl, Smithsonian Magazine, 13 June 2022
  • Williams said that tree ring records do provide some reason for hope — megadroughts do eventually end when the rains return.
    — Washington Post, 15 Feb. 2022
  • My landscape company was just working on my garden and finished edging all the beds and tree rings.
    — Tim Johnson, chicagotribune.com, 5 Sep. 2017
  • Dendochronology, the study of tree rings, can date wooden structures or objects.
    — Erin Blakemore, National Geographic, 28 June 2019
  • Researchers plan to determine how old the timber was when it was cut via dendrochronology, the study of tree rings.
    — Sonja Anderson, Smithsonian Magazine, 12 May 2025
  • As teeth form, the enamel accretes layer by layer, forming lines that scientists can count like tree rings.
    — National Geographic, 21 Sep. 2017
  • The tree ring looks like a little amphitheater, Vandermolen said.
    — Gloria Casas, chicagotribune.com, 17 June 2021
  • The proxies can include annual tree rings and layers of ice deposited over time on glaciers and polar caps.
    — Tom Metcalfe, Scientific American, 26 Jan. 2024
  • If a storm damages and dramatically slows the growth of a tree, the tree ring will be much narrower than normal.
    — Popular Science, 16 Oct. 2020
  • One way to protect all plants would be to mulch your flower beds and tree rings properly with a layer 2-4 inches deep.
    — Markis Hill, Kansas City Star, 25 Feb. 2026
  • Dendrochronological dating, the method of using tree rings to establish the age of wood, match the year the ship was built.
    — CBS News, 2 Apr. 2026
  • But the tree rings also show droughts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and a severe drought in the nineteen-sixties.
    — M. R. O’Connor, The New Yorker, 20 Nov. 2024
  • Examining the width of the tree rings in each core, for example, gives clues about when—and for how long—periods of drought occurred.
    — Jenny Howard, National Geographic, 24 July 2019
  • Like tree rings or the rings found in mammoth tusks, the number of transverse stripes on the outside of nasal horns indicates the animal’s age.
    — Jeanne Timmons, Ars Technica, 17 Sep. 2024

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