How to Use mechanistic in a Sentence

mechanistic

adjective
  • But over the past few weeks, the murmur of Ocean Beach has been cut with a low mechanistic rumble.
    Matt Simon, WIRED, 11 Apr. 2018
  • And so, the mechanistic worldview opened the door to exploitation, waste and abuse.
    Kathleen Dean Moore, The Conversation, 20 Oct. 2021
  • Some of the change in Didion’s writing was mechanistic.
    Evelyn McDonnell, The New Republic, 3 Oct. 2023
  • In a paper recently published in Science, Groves and his colleagues filled in some of the mechanistic blanks.
    Quanta Magazine, 3 June 2019
  • It’s enabled by the mechanistic controls at the Hoover Dam, which releases the same steady flow no matter how little snow falls across the Rocky Mountains.
    Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica, 22 Dec. 2022
  • And in fact, the researchers still don’t have a mechanistic explanation.
    Quanta Magazine, 19 Apr. 2018
  • But when put to the test, with even the most basic mechanistic questions, our ignorance quickly shows itself.
    Jason Castro, Scientific American, 11 Aug. 2020
  • In fact, Doerr’s is much more than a mechanistic or childish device for passing time.
    New York Times, 24 Sep. 2021
  • And the idea most present is that things are beginning to get out of hand, that the mechanistic future promised by science is one in which human life will become cheap and embattled.
    The New York Times, NOLA.com, 19 May 2017
  • That lends more than a touch of jingoism to this otherwise amusing, mechanistic parlor trick, which builds to a surge of emotion that might make your heart sink or soar.
    Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times, 16 Mar. 2023
  • That protein is now called mTOR, for mechanistic target of rapamycin.
    BostonGlobe.com, 28 Jan. 2023
  • But in a mundane, mechanistic sense, a year’s 13th full moon may be explained by citing the different number of days in a lunar month and in a calendar month.
    Washington Post, 30 Dec. 2020
  • By the mid-1700s, with the Industrial Revolution in the global north, a more mechanistic view of the world began to emerge, and the line between living things and machines began to blur.
    IEEE Spectrum, 21 Aug. 2022
  • In our mechanistic framework, leaders face relentless, unforgiving pressure to be the best, the biggest, the first, the most.
    Erica Ariel Fox, Forbes, 28 Oct. 2021
  • Other types of models, like mechanistic ones, account for the behavior of the disease itself.
    Katherine Ellen Foley, Quartz, 22 Apr. 2020
  • Is its movement just a mechanistic response with no feeling behind it?
    Sigal Samuel, Vox, 4 June 2024
  • Piecing together the details of this mechanistic puzzle, Dölen suspects, will keep her occupied for the next decade.
    WIRED, 15 June 2023
  • And in the finale, Heyward played up the contrast between Lee’s mechanistic churn and Bryant’s sinuous figuration.
    Michael Andor Brodeur, Washington Post, 16 June 2024
  • People tend to describe their past immoral actions in concrete, mechanistic terms.
    Matthew Gavin Frank, Harper's Magazine, 21 Feb. 2023
  • The iconic structure of the DNA double helix makes its due appearance, but Zimmer is careful to note that this was just the beginning, not the end, of our mechanistic understanding of life, and of those who contributed to it.
    New York Times, 24 Mar. 2021
  • Heyward then built the third dance from pure romance to a fiery frenzy — the fluid guidance of his fingertips suddenly sharpening into mechanistic chops and swipes.
    Michael Andor Brodeur, Washington Post, 5 May 2023
  • But the mechanistic, reductionist, matter-in-motion worldview stripped the spirit from the natural world.
    Kathleen Dean Moore, The Conversation, 20 Oct. 2021
  • As much as people want the rules for commas to be ironclad, no mechanistic rules can substitute for slow proofreading and redrafting, or even better, a good editor.
    The Economist, 21 Sep. 2017
  • In both cases, ecorithms describe adaptive behavior in a mechanistic way.
    Quanta Magazine, 28 Jan. 2016
  • Its short chapters and sheer eventfulness keep the story chugging along, while its (somewhat mechanistic) plotting creates enough suspense to hold the attention.
    Washington Post, 21 Jan. 2022
  • On a mechanistic level, unabsorbed polyols draw water out of your body and into your gut lumen, resulting in loose, watery stools.
    Patrick Wilson, Outside Online, 7 Aug. 2020
  • This was, to my knowledge, the first mechanistic deconstruction of a social behavior circuit.
    Quanta Magazine, 14 Dec. 2020
  • The current research directed at finding mechanistic clues to long Covid is a resource-intensive and lengthy uncharted process.
    Steven Phillips, STAT, 14 Sep. 2023
  • The other type is a mechanistic model, which predicts how case outcomes would be affected by certain policy actions.
    Dallas News, 5 May 2020
  • Are mind and brain identical, or is the reduction of feelings and thoughts to genes, brain regions and neurochemicals a mechanistic fantasy that has haunted science since the 17th century?
    Siri Hustvedt, Washington Post, 3 June 2022

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

Last Updated: