How to Use diurnal in a Sentence

diurnal

adjective
Definition of diurnalnext
Synonyms for diurnalnext
  • Humans are diurnal creatures, meant to be awake during the day and to wind down at night.
    — Sara Harrison, Wired, 5 July 2021
  • That is the diurnal nature of night and day, decline and rebirth.
    — cleveland, 31 Jan. 2023
  • That, along with a good diurnal shift in temperature, helps keep the wine fresh.
    — Lana Bortolot, Forbes, 30 Nov. 2023
  • We are used to the diurnal cycle of waking, sleeping and dreaming.
    — Christof Koch, Scientific American, 1 Nov. 2017
  • The diurnal changes in blood pressure and heart rate are well known circadian rhythms.
    — Aimee Swartz, The Cut, 6 Oct. 2017
  • Scientists saw that the eye size and shape were similar to those of modern diurnal owls.
    — Margaret Osborne, Smithsonian Magazine, 4 Apr. 2022
  • Our song bird species are diurnal (daytime) feeders and eat insects that are active during the day.
    — oregonlive, 6 June 2020
  • Given the diurnal minimum of heating early in the day, any storms will struggle against that.
    — Ian Livingston, Washington Post, 15 June 2022
  • The glow may serve as a homing signal to help the diurnal wasps find their way back to the nest at dawn and dusk—a time when there’s a bit of UV light from the Sun, but the environment is still mostly dark.
    — David Shultz, Science | AAAS, 24 Aug. 2021
  • That leaves her beachside club almost the entire day to entertain the diurnal, even if that’s the only trait some of her patrons have in common.
    — New York Times, 26 June 2018
  • The most significant shift was in cheetahs, a typically diurnal species -- or one that spends its awake hours during the day -- the researchers said.
    — Julia Jacobo, ABC News, 7 Nov. 2023
  • But humans are a diurnal species, meant to be active during the light phase and sleeping after dark, social calendars be damned.
    — Diane Stoprya, The Cut, 6 Feb. 2018
  • The diurnal vertical migration includes trillions of tiny animals, many in the larval stage, that rise from depths of 1,000 feet or more to just beneath the surface to feed.
    — Erik Olsen New York Times, Star Tribune, 15 Apr. 2021
  • The diurnal vertical migration includes trillions of tiny animals, many in the larval stage, that rise from great depths of 1,000 feet or more to just beneath the surface to feed.
    — New York Times, 30 Mar. 2021
  • Hey, work is a real thing, and so are house chores, errands, meetings and all manner of wildness that society still dictates happen in diurnal time schemes.
    — Kat Bein, Billboard, 18 Jan. 2018
  • These sorts of scenes seem to create a theater set across which Tillim’s subjects move, like characters enacting a diurnal purpose.
    — Carole Naggar, The New York Review of Books, 25 May 2019
  • Degassing patterns at Villarrica and Llaima in Chile appear to follow the diurnal tidal cycle as well, but the eruptions of either volcano don't.
    — Erik Klemetti, Discover Magazine, 25 Sep. 2015
  • In the past year, that emphasis on diurnal rhythms has become pertinent in a way that Rountree could not have anticipated.
    — Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 22 Feb. 2021
  • Measurements are taken in the morning, afternoon and evening to accurately capture the diurnal warming of a city.
    — Haley Brink and Derek Van Dam, CNN, 2 June 2021
  • Passive house systems work really well in climates with big diurnal temperature swings, like the desert.
    — New York Times, 3 July 2019
  • The sharks have been found in shallow waters near the water's surface and ocean depths of up to a mile, suggesting the animals are diurnal, and regularly alternate between deep and shallow.
    — National Geographic, 26 July 2017
  • Sleepover camp options give festival goers a break from the commute and offers a ton of diurnal activities.
    — Kat Bein, Billboard, 9 Nov. 2017
  • This diurnal pattern is also seen on Mars—something scientists weren’t expecting to detect from the surface.
    — National Geographic, 24 Feb. 2020
  • This plan, both experimental and rather uninformed, backfired, as such importations are wont to do, all the more so due to the face that the mongoose is a diurnal animal and rests in dens during the night, the rat a nocturnal one.
    — Rebecca Kreston, Discover Magazine, 30 Jan. 2017
  • Overall, Anderson Valley is one of California’s cooler grape-growing areas, though the diurnal swing can be as much as 40 to 50 degrees on a summer day.
    — Michael Dunne, sacbee.com, 20 June 2017
  • An hour’s patient watch reveals that the entire domed skyscape wheels around—rising eastward, setting westward—in measured diurnal rotation....
    — Alan Hirshfeld, WSJ, 18 June 2020
  • The scientists found that a combination of diurnal tidal stresses and pore fluid pressures promotes shear failure for shallow faults on Titan.
    — David Bressan, Forbes, 14 Oct. 2021
  • Circadian lighting aims to keep the body’s internal clock aligned with the 24-hour diurnal/nocturnal cycle by emitting bright bluish light during the day to suppress the melatonin that our brains produce as a natural sleep aid.
    — New York Times, 8 May 2018
  • That diurnal cycle is linked to the giant impact by a fundamental law of physics, the conservation of angular momentum.
    — Simon J. Lock, Scientific American, 2 July 2019
  • Ideally, the work will also shed light on the mysterious daily migration of creatures, called the diurnal vertical migration, that takes place every night in every ocean around the globe.
    — Erik Olsen New York Times, Star Tribune, 15 Apr. 2021

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