How to Use by degrees in a Sentence
by degrees
idiom
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That is when something happens by degrees, with the sting far along the way.
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Jacobina Martin,
Washington Post,
4 Mar. 2023
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The #MeToo movement offers proof that a culture can change — slowly and by degrees.
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Charles McNulty,
Los Angeles Times,
28 Apr. 2023
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In the register of his voice, the calm vivisection of British actions can mount by degrees into the more insistent tones of a man who has truth on his side.
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Cullen Murphy,
The Atlantic,
15 June 2022
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That said, failing to limit screen content does open the door to harm, by degrees, so weigh that risk and your options for minimizing it, if any.
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Carolyn Hax,
Washington Post,
20 Sep. 2022
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Their comments were by degrees somewhat less offensive than those of Martinez.
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Steve Lopez,
Los Angeles Times,
10 Oct. 2022
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This might be a kind of Purgatory, where talk and memory and proximity to trauma are cleansing agents that, by degrees, lift the soul toward Paradise.
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Vinson Cunningham,
The New Yorker,
27 Mar. 2023
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There was no one who contended or cried out, or drew attention to what was going on, but by degrees the woody swamp became a hermitage, a religious house, a farm, an abbey, a village, a seminary, a school of learning, and a city.
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Andrew Doran,
National Review,
3 Mar. 2022
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In an increment of time not measurable outside a laboratory, my brain will scrape its databases for excuses, sort them by degrees of believability and then spit out whichever one is on top.
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Kyle Whitmire,
al,
12 Aug. 2021
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Just like incremental successes, quitting can also come by degrees.
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John A. List,
WSJ,
30 Dec. 2021
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What begins as an exercise in emotional channeling turns, by degrees, into a laceratingly public admission of her own bourgeois misery.
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Guy Lodge,
Variety,
29 Aug. 2021
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Quantities are highly limited, and discounts are separated into categories determined by degrees of wear.
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Tess Garcia,
Travel + Leisure,
15 Apr. 2021
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And Rahim, quick to embrace this astonishing new notion of himself, embellishes it with glib fibs plus prevarications leading to outright lies, accompanied by anger that grows, by degrees, into rage culminating in physical violence.
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Joe Morgenstern,
WSJ,
6 Jan. 2022
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But if their rhetoric differs by degrees, their motivations are remarkably similar—a violent reinscription of an idealized, traditional idea of womanhood and the nuclear family, one that depends upon a rigid gender binary to maintain itself.
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Esther Wang,
The New Republic,
21 July 2021
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'by degrees.' 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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