How to Use fragmentary in a Sentence

fragmentary

adjective
Definition of fragmentarynext
Synonyms for fragmentarynext
  • That’s in part because there are two types of blackouts: fragmentary and en bloc.
    — Julia Belluz, Vox, 3 Oct. 2018
  • When the author of this fragmentary memoir was at law school, a teen-age cousin had a psychotic break and killed a young boy.
    — The New Yorker, 24 Jan. 2022
  • Hard to know; records are fragmentary and conflated with myth.
    — William Meyers, WSJ, 14 Jan. 2019
  • But reports from the field are often fragmentary and there is much discretion in when to alert the trauma team.
    — Jenny Gold, Kaiser Health News and Sarah Kliff, Washington Post, 2 July 2018
  • But reports from the field are often fragmentary, and there is much discretion in when to alert the trauma team.
    — Jenny Gold, Vox, 20 July 2018
  • The upper jaw bones do not have the weak interface that the fragmentary first finds suggested.
    — Matthew A. Brown, Scientific American, 1 Jan. 2021
  • The stranger left behind little but the usual fragmentary chronicles of the poor and troubled.
    — Paul Greenberg, Arkansas Online, 22 Dec. 2020
  • Also missing is the wealth of fragmentary artifacts expected at a grave site, such as stone tools used to dig the pits.
    — Byann Gibbons, science.org, 5 June 2023
  • But many of these fossils are fragmentary and offer little detail on what this strange fish looked like.
    — Jack Tamisiea, New York Times, 30 Jan. 2024
  • The messages were fragmentary — a code name, a location, a password.
    — Jeffrey Gettleman, BostonGlobe.com, 26 Dec. 2022
  • As a consequence, fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.
    — Valerie Strauss, Washington Post, 15 Jan. 2018
  • Most of the large animals found from this area of the American West are fragmentary, which makes Zuul even more precious.
    — Gemma Tarlach, Discover Magazine, 10 May 2017
  • Others said that the findings were in line with the fragmentary evidence that had been available until now.
    — James Glanz, New York Times, 23 Apr. 2020
  • The language isn’t eloquent but the image is, and the fragmentary form, like a single remembered line of verse, leaves a suggestive echo.
    — Max Norman, The New Yorker, 23 Nov. 2022
  • On overseas sites like Twitter and Facebook that are blocked in China, the response has been muted and fragmentary.
    — New York Times, 30 Nov. 2021
  • There is fragmentary evidence that the United States and its allies worked to counter some of the attacks and to prevent others from being launched.
    — New York Times, 19 Mar. 2022
  • But in many cases the boundaries are not exact, and the information is fragmentary.
    — Bill Turque, Washington Post, 27 June 2017
  • As humans age, sleep becomes lighter and more fragmentary, however, which in turn means that older adults get less deep sleep than younger ones.
    — Brigit Katz, Smithsonian, 10 Mar. 2017
  • Pol is not convinced that Razana is a notosuchian because the fossils found to date are so fragmentary.
    — Traci Watson, USA TODAY, 4 July 2017
  • The Israeli writer Ronit Matalon, who died in 2017 at the age of fifty-eight, was the author of fragmentary but sweeping family novels.
    — Ruth Margalit, The New York Review of Books, 5 Nov. 2020
  • And perhaps this decentering of the canon is inevitably a fragmentary and messy business.
    — Leslie Camhi, The New Yorker, 6 Dec. 2023
  • For more than a century the only known skulls of the ancient bird Ichthyornis were either fragmentary, smashed flat or both.
    — Sid Perkins, Scientific American, 2 May 2018
  • That provides, in two fragmentary lines of Coptic, an answer to a question Karen King had been asking her whole career.
    — Daniel Burke, CNN, 14 Sep. 2020
  • Falk frames his story around the possible career of this John Westwyk, based around fleeting and fragmentary mentions of a monk by that name in abbey records.
    — Chad Orzel, Forbes, 12 May 2021
  • Adrienne Kennedy’s brief, fragmentary play about an interracial romance in the Jim Crow South brings its lovers together and apart for the last time.
    — Alexis Soloski, New York Times, 8 Feb. 2018
  • Certain sculptures may have been conceived as portraits, though the names attached to them are lost, as in the case of the fragmentary head of an Egyptian queen cut from honey-yellow jasper.
    — New York Times, 6 Jan. 2022
  • Features of its teeth and jaws link it to the previously known fragmentary remains of A. anamensis.
    — Kate Wong, Scientific American, 7 Dec. 2019
  • While Denisovan fossils have been few and fragmentary, science has something just as valuable: their DNA.
    — Nathaniel Scharping, Discover Magazine, 30 Dec. 2019
  • The findings from the Late Jurassic period, though fragmentary, suggest the pliosaur was about twice the size of a killer whale — and move lead study author David Martill closer to redemption.
    — Kristen Rogers, CNN, 16 May 2023
  • These rare finds, even with their fragmentary skulls and hands, unveil more about evolution and life during the early Triassic.
    — Jeanne Timmons, Ars Technica, 16 Aug. 2023

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