How to Use inoperative in a Sentence

inoperative

adjective

• With the new federal law in place, the state law has become inoperative.
• The accident had rendered the vehicle inoperative.
• The plants will become inoperative in the first half of 2024.
  — William Thornton | [e-mail], al, 7 Aug. 2023
• When there’s a killer on one side and a dead body on the other, the all-sides stance becomes inoperative.
  — T.a. Frank, The Hive, 16 Aug. 2017
• One bathroom has a hole in a wall, inoperative stall doors and shattered floor tiles.
  — Sharon Noguchi, The Mercury News, 12 May 2017
• The rear drive axle may have the incorrect type of brake cam installed, which could result in inoperative rear axle brakes.
  — Detroit Free Press, 21 Aug. 2021
• The family car was inoperative half of the time with plastic garbage bags as back windows.
  — Bob Nightengale, USA TODAY, 30 Jan. 2022
• The driver failed to use a turn signal while changing lanes and a rear license plate light was inoperative, the sheriff’s office said.
  — Kieran Nicholson, The Denver Post, 3 Dec. 2019
• The windshield wiper motor may become inoperative, causing the wipers to fail.
  — Detroit Free Press, 2 Sep. 2022
• As a result, roughly one-fourth of the pumps in the region were inoperative within 12 months of installation.
  — Marco Bertini, jean-Manuel Izaret, richard Hutchinson, Harvard Business Review, 17 Feb. 2024
• If the fuel pump module is inoperative, the engine may not start or can stall while riding, increasing the risk of a crash or injury, the company said.
  — Mike Snider, USA TODAY, 26 Feb. 2024
• In all, 12 of 32 closed-circuit television cameras at the jail were inoperative at the time of Brice’s death, and showers had a metal bar across the entry way on which curtains were attached.
  — ExpressNews.com, 15 Dec. 2020
• The unexpected flood on Aug. 5 revealed the city had 17 inoperative drainage pumps.
  — Tristan Baurick, NOLA.com, 26 Oct. 2017
• Powers had taken his voice away from the project by choice, but then it was taken away from him against his will after a reaction to an over-the-counter drug left his larynx and vocal cords inoperative for eight months.
  — Larisha Paul, Rolling Stone, 28 Feb. 2023
• One of mine turns to the art in the world’s now shuttered museums: inoperative without the physical presence of attentive viewers.
  — Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 6 Apr. 2020
• The Honda becomes inoperative just after the six-minute mark near Tamiami Trail.
  — Carli Teproff, Charles Rabin, Rebecca Ellis and David Ovalle, miamiherald, 6 June 2018
• How would anyone but Soros' house staff know that the camera guarding the mailbox was inoperative? Exclusive Offer.
  — Garrett M. Graff, Wired, 12 Aug. 2020
• Every home has that one drawer where unknown or inoperative chargers go to become a tangled mess.
  — Kaylei Fear, Better Homes & Gardens, 9 Dec. 2021
• The former police chief also reestablished the department’s K-9 unit which was inoperative for 20 years.
  — Tom Steele, Dallas News, 30 Mar. 2021
• Unfortunately, that whimsy runs in stark contrast to the less appealing elements of the park: the trash, the inoperative fountains, runoff from local farms.
  — Jamie Hale, OregonLive.com, 24 May 2017
• Chiu’s office said the bill would not prevent cities from enacting their own laws to address abandoned, wrecked or inoperative vehicles.
  — Laura J. Nelson, latimes.com, 12 June 2019
• Captain Pearson took this to mean that the cockpit fuel gauges were completely inoperative.
  — Matt Parker, Wired, 23 Jan. 2020
• By December, the InSight team expects the lander to have become inoperative.
  — Julia Musto, Fox News, 18 May 2022
• Roads were clogged all over San Juan because traffic lights were inoperative, and several businesses in busy downtown areas were closed.
  — Washington Post, 18 Apr. 2018
• All twin-engine aircraft can fly with one engine inoperative.
  — John Cox, USA TODAY, 24 June 2018
• The wood is peeling, the leather is cracked, power antenna, air horns, and radio are inoperative, and the power windows work only intermittently.
  — Elana Scherr, Car and Driver, 20 Apr. 2022
• Our test Ocean was plagued with squeaky pedals, an inoperative California mode (where the EV drops all its windows save the windscreen) forcing a switch in car mid-test, and poor handling that was supposedly to be fixed with a software update.
  — Jeremy White, WIRED, 18 Mar. 2024
• Failure to perform this step will result in an inoperative system and an incomplete repair.
  — Nick Statt, The Verge, 12 Nov. 2018
• The onetime pizza delivery man faced a mandatory decade in prison after pleading guilty to explosives charges on March 22 for mailing 16 inoperative pipe bombs days before the midterm elections last fall.
  — Fox News, 5 Aug. 2019
• These placebos always involved hardware, but the hardware could be either inoperative or mis-directed.
  — Kevin Purdy, Ars Technica, 26 Sep. 2023

Last Updated: 19 Dec 2024