How to Use vestigial in a Sentence

vestigial

adjective
  • Well, no one in the vestigial rear seats will be having a good time.
    — Tony Quiroga, Car and Driver, 8 Feb. 2021
  • Adults have vestigial mouth parts and cannot feed, so flowers won’t attract them.
    — Miri Talabac, Baltimore Sun, 18 July 2023
  • In fact, these vestigial teeth slowly die and fall out as the animal ages.
    — Scott Travers, Forbes, 26 Sep. 2024
  • The adults have vestigial mouthparts and cannot feed, and only live about a couple of weeks.
    — Miri Talabac, Baltimore Sun, 6 Apr. 2023
  • The king cab rear seat might best be described as vestigial, as if something larger used to be there.
    — Mark Phelan, Detroit Free Press, 11 Aug. 2021
  • And then society moves on, and certain things start to feel vestigial.
    — New York Times, 3 May 2018
  • The daffy has hot-dog roots but enough vestigial cred to induce a new-schooler to tip his trucker hat.
    — Nick Paumgarten, Outside Online, 11 July 2018
  • All three theropods had beaks but with vestigial, or functionless, tooth sockets.
    — Nicholas St. Fleur, New York Times, 26 Sep. 2017
  • On the shin is a mini extension that curves upward like a thorny vestigial tail.
    — Liana Satenstein, Vogue, 24 Oct. 2018
  • One point of interest was the discovery of small vestigial teeth in the whale’s upper jaw.
    — Eli Wizevich, Smithsonian Magazine, 16 Dec. 2024
  • Lambert says that these tiny limbs had no real function—also known as vestigial organs.
    — Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 15 May 2017
  • The researchers also picked up a shortarse feelerfish, which has short, spindly fins and small vestigial eyes.
    — Megan Gannon, Washington Post, 24 Feb. 2018
  • The vestigial hips on my whale point back to her evolutionary ancestors.
    — Peter Wayne Moe, Longreads, 25 Feb. 2022
  • Maybe Booth is right and parthenogenesis is just a vestigial relic.
    — Byrd Pinkerton, Vox, 12 June 2024
  • Less promoted but nonetheless implicit was the end of a way of a life, albeit a vestigial one.
    — Los Angeles Times, 16 Aug. 2019
  • These tiny earbuds don't have any unsightly tail poking out from your ear or vestigial wire holding them together.
    — Anthony Karcz, Forbes, 15 June 2021
  • Even the showy grille and the vestigial spare-tire hump seem surprisingly appropriate.
    — Csaba Csere, Car and Driver, 9 Feb. 2023
  • Some readers already agreed with them; others had a vestigial commitment that was just beginning to loosen.
    — Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker, 9 Sep. 2024
  • Couture may be the vestigial tail of fashion, but that is an entirely contemporary idea.
    — Vanessa Friedman, New York Times, 4 July 2023
  • But the sidewinding rattlesnake, which comes from a different branch of the viper family tree, still has a few vestigial belly spikes as well as pits.
    — New York Times, 1 Feb. 2021
  • And rear hatches become vestigial doors that lead to the secondary bulletproof rear bulkhead inside.
    — Ezra Dyer, Car and Driver, 6 Oct. 2020
  • So vestigial is the addition of workers that one module does without them completely.
    — Tom Mendelsohn, Ars Technica, 22 Sep. 2018
  • By the time he was extradited, Guzman was a vestigial bone on the body narco—no longer necessary, in the way.
    — Jack Holmes, Esquire, 15 Feb. 2017
  • Their siren-like cry — a harsh rising note that chills the vestigial part of the mammalian brain that remembers living in burrows — echoed off the stone buildings.
    — Los Angeles Times, 5 Apr. 2022
  • Okay, fine, formal scarves aren’t really doing a whole lot in terms of warmth, but there’s nothing wrong with a vestigial accessory.
    — Hannah Jackson, Vogue, 16 Jan. 2025
  • Neanderthals may have had lower pain thresholds than modern humans, who were found to retain a vestigial ability to perk up their ears.
    — Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Harper's Magazine, 15 Sep. 2020
  • Later, the attacking cells were shown to come from the thymus, a small, spongy organ, then thought to be vestigial, that straddled the esophagus.
    — Dhruv Khullar, The New Yorker, 11 Aug. 2021
  • Stoker plays upon our vestigial stygiophobia, our fear of a fate worse than death and a hell beyond time, as skillfully as an old pipe organ.
    — Stefan Beck, WSJ, 27 Oct. 2017
  • More than 100 vestigial anomalies occur in humans.
    — Encyclopedia Britannica, 2 Apr. 2026
  • Historic buildings still bear the vestigial mark of these public-health strategies, long after the scientific thinking has moved on.
    — Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic, 22 Feb. 2021

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