How to Use proportional in a Sentence

proportional

adjective
  • The features of the face in the drawing are proportional.
  • The head is the same, but the neck is a bit longer to make the robot more proportional overall.
    IEEE Spectrum, 8 Mar. 2023
  • The change in electrical current is proportional to the amount of gas in the air.
    Lorraine Wilde, Treehugger, 7 June 2023
  • The number of flares and CMEs that occur is proportional to the number of sunspots on the solar disk.
    Matthew Cappucci and Joe Kunches, Anchorage Daily News, 13 Jan. 2023
  • The size of each square is proportional to the approximate area of each place.
    New York Times, 10 Aug. 2021
  • And just as the size of the event horizon is proportional to the black hole's mass, so, too, is the black hole's shadow: the more massive the black hole, the larger the shadow.
    Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 13 Apr. 2023
  • In this case, the entropy is proportional to the three-dimensional volume of the box, not the area.
    Edgar Shaghoulian, Scientific American, 22 Aug. 2022
  • Inertia is proportional to a body's mass, or the amount of matter that a body has.
    John S. Tobey, Forbes, 13 Oct. 2021
  • If two shapes are similar, the angle measures are the same and the side lengths are proportional.
    Mark Wolfmeyer, Popular Mechanics, 25 May 2022
  • The proportional increase is less than the male fighting force, which has more than tripled over the same period.
    Maria Varenikova, New York Times, 8 Nov. 2023
  • Putting a piece on either generates a new piece on the other that is proportional. Pick the shape up with your mouse, then place it on a grid made of black-and-white squares.
    Sam MacHkovech, Ars Technica, 22 Apr. 2022
  • Bar width is proportional to the age group’s share of the total population.
    New York Times, 30 Nov. 2021
  • The audit found a sharp increase in the number of hospices in L.A. County since 2010 without a proportional need for end-of-life care.
    Ben Poston, Los Angeles Times, 29 Mar. 2022
  • Israel has launched a counter strike into Palestine, which has reached a proportional death toll there as well.
    Jenny Goldsberry, Washington Examiner, 8 Oct. 2023
  • As its name suggests, this means that each electoral group or party receives a number of seats that is proportional to its share of the vote.
    Matt Ford, The New Republic, 14 Oct. 2022
  • The rebates aren’t targeted to need or proportional to gas use.
    Dominic Pino, National Review, 25 Mar. 2022
  • Fs = -kx) states that the force needed to extend or compress a spring by some distance is proportional to that distance.
    WIRED, 22 Nov. 2022
  • Will the breakdown of Democratic and Republican seats be proportional to how the state votes as a whole?
    Journal Sentinel, 9 Jan. 2024
  • Some men might just carry excess fat in their breasts, so exercise can help to reduce the area down to a more proportional size.
    Lara Rosenbaum, Men's Health, 25 Jan. 2023
  • The weakness of Russia’s claimed just cause means that this war cannot be considered proportional.
    Valerie Morkevicius, The Conversation, 5 Mar. 2022
  • Meanwhile, the volume of each note is proportional to the brightness of the particular section of the image.
    Dan Falk, Smithsonian Magazine, 1 Mar. 2023
  • This approach takes time proportional to the number of boxes.
    Ben Brubaker, Quanta Magazine, 20 July 2023
  • That’s in part because of how much fuel is used in fishing boats proportional to the end-product amount of protein obtained.
    Time, 12 Jan. 2023
  • Since Illinois produces mostly pumpkins for the can, the proportional amount of waste there is lower.
    Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 11 Nov. 2022
  • Both percentages are not proportional to the Black population in the U.S., which sits at 14%.
    Andrew J. Campa, Los Angeles Times, 11 Oct. 2023
  • If the preliminary data holds, the increase would be the biggest proportional increase the state has seen since 1972, the report said.
    From Usa Today Network and Wire Reports, USA TODAY, 9 Sep. 2021
  • And yet, sometimes, in communicating changing or proportional ideas, words just aren’t the right tool for the task.
    Andy Larsen, The Salt Lake Tribune, 15 Jan. 2022
  • The key lesson clients need to learn is what constitutes an acceptable risk proportional to their wealth.
    Todd Longwell, Variety, 8 Nov. 2023
  • If there's no air drag on a falling object, then the total force is only the gravitational force and this is proportional to the mass.
    WIRED, 10 Nov. 2023
  • If no one reaches this threshold, then the delegates will be split up among candidates proportional to the statewide vote.
    Rachel Schilke, Washington Examiner, 30 July 2023

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

Last Updated: