How to Use dam in a Sentence

dam

1 of 2 noun
Definition of damnext
Synonyms for damnext
  • The water ripped apart a two-lane road and fences that ran across the top of the dam.
    — Jan M. Olsen, Anchorage Daily News, 9 Aug. 2023
  • Think of the floating ice shelf as a dam that holds back the ice sheet on land.
    — WIRED, 27 Oct. 2023
  • The dune and beach southeast of the dam, known as Rick's Beach, will be open to the public.
    — Tanya Wildt, Detroit Free Press, 23 Feb. 2024
  • Water was rushing through a tunnel at the base of the dam.
    — Ian James, Los Angeles Times, 24 Mar. 2024
  • The dam has been controversial since it was built in the mid-1960s.
    — Linda McIntosh, San Diego Union-Tribune, 12 Jan. 2024
  • And in order to construct the dam, workers sliced off part of a hill.
    — Sara Novak, Discover Magazine, 30 Nov. 2023
  • The dam sits at the end of the Dnieper River, in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region.
    — Serhii Korolchuk, Washington Post, 6 June 2023
  • At the same time, the warmer water flowing through the dam and downstream made the Grand Canyon more hospitable to bass.
    — WIRED, 4 Nov. 2023
  • The White has long been the subject of a dam proposal in Colorado.
    — Brandon Loomis, The Arizona Republic, 30 June 2023
  • That was the first crack in the dam for me in terms of maybe this movie is going to be something different.
    — Abbey White, The Hollywood Reporter, 19 June 2023
  • At the time, the family was building a 1,600-foot dam on the land to irrigate rice.
    — Sara Novak, Discover Magazine, 30 Nov. 2023
  • When Neil passed, there was an outpouring, like a dam burst.
    — Rob Tannenbaum, Los Angeles Times, 13 Nov. 2023
  • While Mom runs inside, Bluey is thrilled to be out in the rain and begins to build a dam against the water on a walkway.
    — Douglas Piper, The Conversation, 21 July 2023
  • Removing the dams is only the first step in the restoration effort.
    — oregonlive, 17 June 2023
  • My father used to work in the Ministry of Construction, working with a lot of dams.
    — Charlie Hobbs, Condé Nast Traveler, 3 May 2024
  • Two boys were found trapped on a concrete ledge that connects to the backside of the dam, fire officials said.
    — Ivan Pereira, ABC News, 14 July 2023
  • The plan is to not allow visitors north of the Big Sable River and close the dam, footbridge and highway bridge.
    — Tanya Wildt, Detroit Free Press, 23 Feb. 2024
  • River anglers will find success drifting the lure to and around wing dams.
    — David A. Rose, Field & Stream, 20 Mar. 2024
  • Huge volumes of water were pouring over the western parts of the dam, Thomson said.
    — Jan M. Olsen, BostonGlobe.com, 9 Aug. 2023
  • But the people living around the dam and its reservoir look certain to bear the most suffering.
    — Alexander Smith, NBC News, 6 June 2023
  • Liberty Reservoir drowned much of the river valley after the dam was built in the 1950s.
    — Mary Ann Ashcraft, Baltimore Sun, 21 July 2023
  • That doesn’t make dams nearly as bad for the climate as fossil fuels are.
    — Sammy Roth, Los Angeles Times, 14 Mar. 2024
  • Usually, Mendenhall Glacier traps water in the basin, like a dam.
    — Margaret Osborne, Smithsonian Magazine, 11 Aug. 2023
  • That said, gutter guards aren’t designed to prevent ice dams.
    — Kat De Naoum, Better Homes & Gardens, 25 Aug. 2023
  • The last dam — the one furthest downstream in the Kherson region — is controlled by Russian forces.
    — Lori Hinnant and Vasilisa Stepanenko, Anchorage Daily News, 25 May 2023
  • Fall Creek’s openings are more fish-friendly than those at other dams.
    — Tony Schick, ProPublica, 31 Oct. 2023
  • But in June 2023, the Kakhovka dam, which maintains the reservoir, exploded.
    — Nataliya Gumenyuk, The Atlantic, 6 Mar. 2024
  • Coffman acknowledged there would be short-term impacts to the land as the reservoirs drain and the dams are demolished.
    — The Arizona Republic, 16 Feb. 2024
  • The Colorado below the Glen Canyon Dam runs clear and cold, its heavy sediment load having settled in the reservoir above the dam.
    — Wade Davis, Rolling Stone, 3 Sep. 2023
  • The Kakhovka dam — the one furthest downstream — is controlled by Russian forces.
    — Time, 6 June 2023
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dam

2 of 2 verb
  • The time to dam the rivers of violence, to stop the flow of guns into our city and to protect the lives of our children is NOW.
    — Daniel Kreps, Rolling Stone, 11 June 2022
  • The country will need to dam even more rivers to guarantee water through the end of the century.
    — Tribune News Service, Hartford Courant, 10 Jan. 2024
  • That way, rain will cascade right off the lid without damming up against the bottom frame member.
    — Joseph Truini, Popular Mechanics, 27 Mar. 2023
  • Not long ago, an attempt was made to dam Yellowstone Lake.
    — Justin Beal, Harper’s Magazine , 12 Dec. 2022
  • The trade-offs in deciding whether to dam a wild river can be difficult to assess.
    — John Wendle, Scientific American, 29 June 2016
  • In the midst of the valley, at the confluence of two rivers that have been dammed and diverted almost to the point of disappearance, there is a wilderness.
    — Jake Bittle, WIRED, 6 Jan. 2024
  • Bursts of the anomalous westerlies have helped to push those pulses of warm water toward South America, and to dam them up on that side of the ocean basin.
    — Tom Yulsman, Discover Magazine, 5 Aug. 2015
  • The affected portions of the stream have been dammed to protect the downstream water, according to the company.
    — Sasha Pezenik, ABC News, 21 Feb. 2023
  • Both rivers are dammed upstream, in part for flood control, but the reservoirs that hold back the water are at near capacity and letting flows through.
    — Kurtis Alexander, San Francisco Chronicle, 20 Mar. 2023
  • Newitz asked House for suggestions on how characters would dam a river.
    — Patrick J. Kiger, Los Angeles Times, 9 Mar. 2023
  • Without the distraction of TV, my siblings and I would spend all our time in the forest, damming streams to make swimming holes, building forts, playing fox and rabbit in the thigh-deep snow.
    — Mike Sacks, The New Yorker, 2 Apr. 2023
  • Capitalism is a group of people who have enough money to get upstream and take giant buckets, take all the water, dam it up.
    — Riley Van Steward, Forbes, 27 Mar. 2023
  • This, a few weeks before charging into Ukraine — which heroically chose an attempt to dam the Red Sea rather than take the fetal position.
    — Nick Canepa Columnist, San Diego Union-Tribune, 5 Mar. 2022
  • Teams are now working to pump in clean water to the section, which was dammed following the crash to contain any contamination.
    — Morgan Winsor, ABC News, 17 Feb. 2023
  • Greater melting is filling glacial lakes to the brim, causing disastrous floods when rocky ridges that dam the lakes burst because of the immense water pressure behind them.
    — Walter Immerzeel, Scientific American, 1 Jan. 2021
  • It was mostly drained in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as its tributaries were dammed and diverted for agriculture.
    — Terry Castleman, Los Angeles Times, 6 Apr. 2023
  • This method is more successful when the barrier is positioned to redirect the flow of lava, rather than simply dam it.
    — Erik Klemetti, Discover Magazine, 27 Mar. 2014
  • There, the Little Colorado was dammed to create a 1,500-acre irrigation reservoir.
    — Debra Utacia Krol, The Arizona Republic, 23 Mar. 2023
  • The $4-billion off-stream reservoir is intended to hold storm water from the Sacramento River and would not dam the river or block fish migration.
    — Louis Sahagúnstaff Writer, Los Angeles Times, 31 May 2022
  • Helper • After a century of getting dammed, diverted, moved out of its channel and, in some places, tapped completely dry, a big section of the Price River now flows free.
    — Leia Larsen, The Salt Lake Tribune, 28 Aug. 2023
  • Retreating glaciers around the world have created unstable lakes that are dammed by ice or sediment.
    — Anna Canny, Anchorage Daily News, 13 Aug. 2023
  • Crews are working to pump in clean water to the section, which was dammed following the crash to contain any contamination, according to DeWine.
    — Matt Foster, ABC News, 20 Feb. 2023
  • As the site of a generating station built to dam the Nelson River and provide power to Winnipeg and other cities, Jenpeg also happened to be one of the most ephemeral of places.
    — Angela Ajayi, Star Tribune, 19 Mar. 2021
  • But that stream of vaccines, though welcome, will do little to dam the river of new infections that has flooded California in recent weeks.
    — Luke Money, Los Angeles Times, 15 Dec. 2020
  • Are hydropower dams a valuable source of climate-friendly energy or fish-killing monstrosities that should be torn down?
    — Sammy Roth, Los Angeles Times, 2 May 2023
  • Once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River, Tulare Lake was largely drained in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the rivers that fed it were dammed and diverted for agriculture.
    — Times Staff, Los Angeles Times, 28 Mar. 2023
  • Others wanted to dam the river, which could provide hydroelectric power and form the kind of placid lake that had spurred the development of lodges, restaurants and retirement homes elsewhere in the Ozarks.
    — Bruce Upholt, Smithsonian Magazine, 6 July 2022
  • The decision was largely informed by alarmingly low salmon runs as a result of heavily dammed, diked and channeled streams struggling to maintain healthy flows in the face of droughts and warming summers.
    — oregonlive, 17 June 2023
  • Some members of the water development commission suggested Utah needs to dam more rivers.
    — Brian Maffly, The Salt Lake Tribune, 14 Sep. 2021
  • An ancient lake About 16 million years ago, a lava flow in what would one day become Clarkia, Idaho, dammed a local drainage system and created a deep lake in a narrow, steep-sided valley.
    — Robert Patalano, The Conversation, 5 Feb. 2024

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