How to Use inessential in a Sentence

inessential

adjective
  • The truth is, Jackson has been inessential for quite some time.
    Rohan Nadkarni, SI.com, 22 June 2017
  • But for good and ill, all the Marxists are inessential workers, too.
    Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review, 28 June 2021
  • Vegetable dishes are a welcome break to the meat-and-carb parade, but often inessential.
    oregonlive, 16 Dec. 2022
  • In March, when Cuomo ordered inessential projects to shut down, the workers had been about to laminate the dealership’s walls with Sheetrock.
    Elizabeth Barber, The New Yorker, 29 May 2020
  • Just ask any of the thousands of tech workers who were recently laid off because their CEO’s pet pivot-to-X project was deemed inessential.
    Lauren Goode, WIRED, 11 Mar. 2023
  • Everything inessential has been exiled or at least tucked away.
    Willard Spiegelman, WSJ, 18 June 2021
  • The arches themselves, strange, impressive, grotesque, form but a small and inessential part of the general beauty of this country.
    Douglas Brinkley, New York Times, 26 Jan. 2018
  • This was an Oscars where a moment tailor-made for a professional wrestling match somehow made the clothes feel inessential.
    Dave Schilling, Los Angeles Times, 28 Mar. 2022
  • The group also did not say how many patents had been submitted for evaluation only to be deemed inessential.
    Peter Bright, WIRED, 1 Aug. 2011
  • In the wake of all this attrition, the Ravens’ push for another playoff berth depends on players who were seemingly inessential to the team’s plans as of the Sept. 13 season opener.
    Childs Walker, baltimoresun.com, 26 Dec. 2020
  • The Hawkeye finale features plenty of cliffhangers for the future, making a post-credits scene inessential.
    Chris Smith, BGR, 24 Dec. 2021
  • As an expansion of the Star Wars saga, Solo is absolutely inessential.
    Brian Raftery, WIRED, 23 May 2018
  • From Gibson’s pounding there-and-back-again story, meanwhile, Mendes takes the idea of constant movement, and stripped-down, against-the-clock racing, as the way to tell his story, with everything inessential pared away.
    Ross Douthat, National Review, 23 Jan. 2020
  • Even so, what led up to the album is wholly inessential to absorb the shimmering, lovely and chilling music that resulted.
    Morgan Enos, Billboard, 12 Apr. 2018
  • Our relationships with loved ones deepened, and relationships that were inessential kind of fell away.
    Luke Leitch, Vogue, 7 Oct. 2020
  • There are very few Marvel Cinematic Universe projects that can be simply dismissed as bad or inessential.
    Joshua Axelrod, Anchorage Daily News, 8 Nov. 2021
  • There are a few stories in this ample collection that seem inessential, and Shriver’s fondness for abundance leaves a couple feeling a bit overstuffed.
    Stephen McCauley, New York Times, 21 May 2018
  • Kelly Takemura faced a different problem: as the pandemic spreads, who gets care and whose care becomes inessential?
    John Leland, New York Times, 22 Mar. 2020
  • But all this presents itself as ambient knowledge, inessential to the archetypal drama that will unfold between strong and weak children, in a town that could be anywhere or nowhere.
    Merve Emre, The New Yorker, 31 May 2021
  • Long before, Mull had concluded that accepting the loss of inessential things was an elemental lesson that his present life, his life since entering the tesseractic house, had to teach him.
    Jonathan Lethem, The New Yorker, 1 Mar. 2021
  • We are told again and again to put the most important point up front, instructed multiple times that headlines should have six words or less, and told ad infinitum that readers are too busy today to read inessential writing.
    Colin Dickey, The New Republic, 15 Sep. 2022
  • While Arts & Venues defers inessential maintenance to route money toward operations, staffers have devised a four-point plan to herald the return of public arts.
    Ray Mark Rinaldi, The Denver Post, 28 June 2020
  • Those professionals of another era, Grenney adds, not only possessed a knack for mixing the grand with the modest but managed to distill their tastes to a point where little remained that was inessential.
    Guy Trebay, Town & Country, 29 Mar. 2021
  • That sounds easy enough, but only a great detective, like the fastidious Belgian (or Sherlock Holmes!), can disentangle the essential from the inessential.
    Washington Post, 14 Apr. 2021
  • Though the song’s title starts as a negative, describing Ken as inessential, the group elevates it to a chant of self-affirming validation, one that stops them from warring with each other and themselves.
    Ashley Lee, Los Angeles Times, 28 July 2023
  • For whatever reason, neutrophils have a history of being slandered as inessential grunts.
    Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic, 17 June 2021
  • And considering all the inessential performances that the Grammys subjected viewers to this year, the show could’ve afforded to give Petty a lengthier tribute than just a few verses.
    Maeve McDermott, USA TODAY, 28 Jan. 2018
  • Manet has eschewed furniture and everything else inessential.
    Willard Spiegelman, WSJ, 13 Apr. 2018
  • But what really keeps Luang Prabang so low-key is the perception, among travelers, of its being inessential; the town has become special because it’s not been considered special enough.
    Hanya Yanagihara, Condé Nast Traveler, 20 Nov. 2018
  • Everything indirect, inessential and, above all, historical has been stripped away.
    Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, 8 Nov. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'inessential.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: