How to Use pin down in a Sentence

pin down

verb
Definition of pin downnext
  • Nobody has been able to pin down exactly when the trees were put in the median or who decided to do it.
    — Bay Area News Group, The Mercury News, 25 June 2024
  • For such an essential part of blockbuster cinema, the definition of a disaster movie can be surprisingly hard to pin down.
    — James Grebey, TIME, 19 July 2024
  • That has, at times, made the chief justice hard to pin down.
    — John Fritze, USA TODAY, 10 July 2023
  • But even if the group’s sound is hard to pin down, the people are loving it.
    — Erica Gonzales, ELLE, 18 July 2023
  • Maybe it can only be done with a word that’s just as hard to pin down.
    — Michael Schneider, Variety, 2 Dec. 2023
  • And the thing is, those numbers are really hard to pin down.
    — Taylor Wilson, USA TODAY, 4 Aug. 2023
  • Waiting Too Long to Book Airline awards can be tricky to pin down.
    — Eric Rosen, Travel + Leisure, 7 June 2024
  • Macdonald had to use her whole body to pin down the squirming shark.
    — Linda Robertson, Miami Herald, 27 Mar. 2024
  • Perhaps that’s what makes the film hard to pin down for audiences.
    — Helena Andrews-Dyer, Washington Post, 25 Jan. 2024
  • And yet what surprised him even more was that Marshall’s team was the first to pin down these numbers.
    — Carl Zimmer, San Diego Union-Tribune, 28 May 2024
  • It may have been used for slashing or pinning down prey.
    — Joshua Rapp Learn, Discover Magazine, 11 July 2023
  • There are plenty of people, Carson says, who have tried to pin down where the term came from.
    — Morgan Hines, USA TODAY, 10 Aug. 2023
  • For her, the mere fact that the band shifted its sound from record to record and wasn’t easy to pin down made a major impression.
    — David Browne, Rolling Stone, 10 May 2024
  • But the scale of this volcanic activity has been hard to pin down.
    — Discover Magazine, 26 Oct. 2023
  • The fire can help pin down enemy troops or stop their advance, crews said.
    — Serhii Korolchuk, Washington Post, 23 Sep. 2023
  • Sitting up there in the morning, as the sun got stronger and the chatter from the street rose up, was the kind of luxury that is so hard to pin down.
    — Cnt Editors, Condé Nast Traveler, 20 Dec. 2023
  • The first step would be to pin down Russia’s forces in the Kherson and Luhansk regions and in the northern part of Donetsk.
    — Alexander Vindman, Foreign Affairs, 2 Feb. 2023
  • And there was this woman at its center who was always a bit of a cipher, hard to pin down.
    — Jessica Ferri, Los Angeles Times, 11 Sep. 2023
  • But scientists have been struggling to pin down the specifics of the inner core’s motion.
    — Rudy Molinek, Smithsonian Magazine, 1 July 2024
  • More research will be needed to pin down the details — to find the control that adjusts the control.
    — Quanta Magazine, 11 Mar. 2024
  • Even so, the definition of a flying car is a little hard to pin down.
    — Christopher Elliott, USA TODAY, 9 Apr. 2024
  • Even so, the definition of a flying car is a little hard to pin down.
    — Christopher Elliott, USA TODAY, 5 Apr. 2024
  • The reasons for his particular palate were hard to pin down.
    — Vivian Ewing, New York Times, 17 Feb. 2024
  • Which becomes harder to pin down, and thus some people will try and control it.
    — Daniel Scheffler, SPIN, 1 June 2023
  • The music played and created that night is a bit more difficult to pin down.
    — David Browne, Rolling Stone, 11 Aug. 2023
  • Neighbors described him as friendly but hard to pin down.
    — Charles Bethea, The New Yorker, 28 Aug. 2023
  • For those with a strong feel for the holiday, our Valentine’s Day gift guide has small and grand gestures alike to pin down their love.
    — Talia Abbas, Vogue, 31 Jan. 2024
  • As tides go in and out, the ice heaves up and down, movement that is tracked by satellites to pin down the exact location of the grounding lines.
    — WIRED, 7 Nov. 2023
  • This results in a curve with many wiggles that can only be pinned down by looking at many points.
    — Michael Greshko, Quanta Magazine, 10 Jan. 2024
  • But the more the music industry tried to pin down the Rangers, the more the band resisted being pigeonholed.
    — Garret K. Woodward, Rolling Stone, 20 Feb. 2024

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