How to Use more or less in a Sentence

more or less

adverb
  • The sports-movie genre has more or less primed us for one thing: winning.
    Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 6 Oct. 2024
  • The characters and actors should be more or less set for the next season.
    Josh St. Clair, Men's Health, 24 Oct. 2022
  • Genevieve giggles over the uncertainty, but says that if things don’t go her way tonight, things are more or less over for her.
    Nick Caruso, TVLine, 9 Oct. 2024
  • At one point, a Newsweek journalist more or less just looked in the phone book for Nakamotos.
    Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker, 9 Oct. 2024
  • Organisms, including human beings, are no more or less than the sum of those parts.
    Siri Hustvedt, Washington Post, 24 Oct. 2022
  • While the number of in-person early voters has jumped, requests for mail-in ballots are more or less flat.
    Jake Zuckerman, cleveland, 19 Oct. 2022
  • Davis was more or less rocking his signature look — a red Adidas tracksuit, hair in mangy dreads.
    Ed Masley, The Arizona Republic, 4 Oct. 2024
  • That thicket of trees on the other site is more or less what this site used to look like — that, plus the contamination.
    Brian Amaral, BostonGlobe.com, 18 Oct. 2022
  • All these deals have been more or less waved through by the Federal Trade Commission.
    Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 18 Oct. 2022
  • There was this unspoken assumption that whoever was doing it had more or less her best interest in mind or at least didn’t have any malicious intent.
    Chris Smith, BGR, 13 Oct. 2022
  • The foremost symbol of the sixties, the High Priest of Protest, more or less sat out the rest of the decade, making very few public appearances.
    David Remnick, The New Yorker, 24 Oct. 2022
  • Pure trial and error across millions, even billions of virtual games, starting out more or less randomly pulling whatever levers were available, and attempting to learn from the results.
    New Atlas, 29 Sep. 2024
  • The same goes for flu vaccines, which are also retooled each year: When measured across the population, the frequency and intensity of side effects remain more or less the same.
    Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic, 21 Oct. 2022
  • Two oilmen would come to grief, more or less, in the 1920s.
    Patt Morrison, Los Angeles Times, 3 Aug. 2023
  • The Indy 500, run on the same day and more or less at the same time, was.
    Scott Fowler, Charlotte Observer, 21 May 2024
  • At the time, the city felt quiet, remote, and more or less off the map in the eyes of the rest of the globe.
    Ian Volner, Travel + Leisure, 30 Sep. 2023
  • The new ship is more or less a dupe of the Seabourn Venture, which launched in 2022.
    Paul Brady, Travel + Leisure, 14 Aug. 2023
  • The plan for the third voyage was more or less the inverse of the second’s.
    Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, 1 Apr. 2024
  • Of those six, two fall in love with Jackie more or less on sight.
    Angie Han, The Hollywood Reporter, 7 Dec. 2023
  • Their stock prices had more or less flatlined for at least a decade.
    Bygeoff Colvin, Fortune, 20 Apr. 2024
  • Ideally, the end of your sleeve and the bottom of the jacket should more or less line up.
    Brad Lanphear, Men's Health, 6 Jan. 2023
  • Or maybe the laptop with a little more or less hard drive space is in stock.
    Louryn Strampe, WIRED, 19 Dec. 2023
  • With this strategy, over time, the highs and lows more or less even out.
    Alicia Adamczyk, Fortune, 30 July 2024
  • The exception is the free throw, stuck more or less where it’s always been.
    Robert O’Connell, WSJ, 27 Nov. 2023
  • Each dimmable light strip stretches 5 feet and can be set to a timer to give them more or less time to move around the room.
    Hannah Rice, Rolling Stone, 1 Dec. 2023
  • The contents of the suitcase, more or less, told Emil Hess’s life story.
    Rick Rojas, New York Times, 9 May 2024
  • Lips can become chapped too for more or less the same reasons.
    Jeffrey Kluger, TIME, 22 July 2024
  • All of this, more or less, belonged to Limonov’s universe.
    Nick Vivarelli, Variety, 19 May 2024
  • The fish cannot scream; the abuse is more or less happening below the surface, out of sight.
    Kory Grow, Rolling Stone, 5 Nov. 2023
  • Too soon to say which days could see more or less storms, or what time of day storms are most likely.
    Dan Stillman, Washington Post, 12 July 2023

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