How to Use rotary in a Sentence

rotary

1 of 2 adjective
  • Phones moved from the desk to the wall and rotary dials gave way to punch buttons.
    Beth Thames | Bethmthames@gmail.com, al, 6 Apr. 2022
  • Food debris found on rotary slicer in the back kitchen.
    Kunle Falayi, The Arizona Republic, 21 Dec. 2022
  • The guest book was a rotary phone on which guests could leave messages.
    Jenny Block, New York Times, 18 Nov. 2022
  • Long gone are the days of rotary phones and missed calls and not even a voicemail box to refer to.
    Dallas News, 22 Sep. 2022
  • But for the rest of us, a plain, old rotary mower is going to do a good job.
    Tom MacCubbin, Orlando Sentinel, 10 Sep. 2022
  • The 67-year-old was an avid cyclist and a member of the city of Lodi’s rotary club.
    Washington Post, 29 Mar. 2022
  • Maybe even call on a rotary dial phone, or a Nokia shaped like a brick, to stick with ’90s vibe.
    Jason Gay, WSJ, 20 Dec. 2020
  • Each booth has a phone jack behind it, and a red rotary phone will be brought to the table for calls.
    Dallas News, 24 Aug. 2022
  • Beneath the Mute button, there’s a rotary knob that can be used to adjust the amount of gain.
    Mark Sparrow, Forbes, 16 Mar. 2023
  • Big Mama was in the doorway of the kitchen, talking on the rotary telephone.
    Michelle Singletary, Washington Post, 16 Oct. 2020
  • The habitat entrance consists of a door with a rotary valve that must be turned to unlock the door.
    IEEE Spectrum, 23 Jan. 2023
  • For the past seven years, Sutz has continued to paint with a torn rotary cuff in his right arm.
    AZCentral.com, 17 Oct. 2021
  • The laptop is equipped with the Asus rotary control dial.
    Scharon Harding, Ars Technica, 6 Dec. 2021
  • The fate of the Pac-12 rests in the hands that handed out funnel cake on behalf of the rotary club at last weekend’s Palouse Empire Fair.
    Bill Oram, oregonlive, 11 Sep. 2023
  • Inside is an old black rotary phone Not hooked up to anything.
    Sylvie Baumgartel, The New Yorker, 25 Oct. 2021
  • Using scissors or a rotary cutter and mat, cut 6-inch-wide strips from the bottom to the top of the sideways T-shirts.
    Lauren Bengtson, Better Homes & Gardens, 4 Nov. 2020
  • There’s a rotary dial here that comes in handy for those who don’t want to have to constantly reach for the touchscreen.
    Christian De Looper, BGR, 17 June 2022
  • On a floor with small hexagonal tiles, a rotary tool fitted with a 1/16-inch bit works well.
    Washington Post, 23 May 2021
  • And the rotary hammer chuck equips it for masonry drilling.
    Joe Truini, Popular Mechanics, 1 Sep. 2020
  • There are nine rotary snowplows, huge trucks that collect snow off the roads and fling it into the nearby forests.
    St. John Barned-Smith, San Francisco Chronicle, 12 Mar. 2023
  • There are six length guards included and a rotary dial to adjust the blade length.
    Men's Health, 14 Feb. 2023
  • It's controlled via a rotary knob on the center console.
    Becca Hackett, Car and Driver, 21 July 2023
  • Certain older norms of concert etiquette seem to have gone the way of the rotary phone and passing only on the left.
    Luke Schulze, San Diego Union-Tribune, 13 Mar. 2023
  • The right side of the screen is touch-sensitive but can also be controlled with the rotary dial on the center stack.
    Jonathan M. Gitlin, Ars Technica, 28 June 2022
  • The four rotary control knobs—one to control the washer, one for the dryer, one for the temperature, and one for the load size—are a breeze to use and get the hang of.
    Kat De Naoum, Better Homes & Gardens, 3 May 2023
  • The rotary encoder is fitting in the centre of the board, but this could course be moved to elsewhere and attached via flying leads.
    IEEE Spectrum, 30 Jan. 2024
  • The rotary controller on the center console does what it was designed for, but Benz and BMW do it better.
    Josh Max, Forbes, 5 May 2021
  • The rover is equipped with a rotary percussive drill (with extra drill bits) that both spins and hammers into the rock.
    Ramin Skibba, Wired, 2 Sep. 2021
  • Their products range from detail trimmers to body groomers to rotary shavers.
    Chris Hachey, BGR, 3 Aug. 2022
  • The rotary knob is also fully configurable, and is set to control volume by default.
    PCMAG, 15 Sep. 2023
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rotary

2 of 2 noun
  • What Mazda fans will be glad to hear is that the rotary is not dead.
    Peter Lyon, Forbes, 23 June 2021
  • Use a gouge or rotary tool ($50, The Home Depot) to etch large sections.
    Sarah Martens, Better Homes & Gardens, 15 Oct. 2020
  • The truck was last seen entering the rotary in the area of Broadway and Main Street in Everett.
    BostonGlobe.com, 28 July 2019
  • Read on for our picks of the best electric shavers for men, from rotary to foil options, and even one for the bald-head shavers.
    Adam Hurly, Robb Report, 15 Aug. 2022
  • The rollover location is about a half-mile north of the West Beach/Middle Beach rotary.
    Peter Marteka, courant.com, 25 June 2019
  • The cordless handset sits atop its base like an old rotary—a nice design twist.
    Paul Schrodt, WSJ, 5 July 2018
  • Along with adding a few ponies to the spunky rotary, these extras likely brought some higher decibels to the engine's howl.
    Jack Fitzgerald, Car and Driver, 26 Apr. 2023
  • Then turn the rotary switch to Volts AC (Vac), which is also indicated by a wavy line on the dial.
    Joseph Truini, Popular Mechanics, 21 Oct. 2020
  • The caller told police the Toyota was heading toward the Route 3A rotary.
    Emily Sweeney, BostonGlobe.com, 13 Jan. 2023
  • That’s why a manual can opener with a safety rotary like this pick from Kuhn Rikon is a great option.
    Adria Greenhauff, Better Homes & Gardens, 31 Jan. 2023
  • Then firefighters used a rotary saw to cut just above the kitten’s whereabouts, and carefully knocked away loose bricks to free it.
    Brian Whitehead, Orange County Register, 30 May 2017
  • There are four different styles of graters: box, rotary, flat, and rasp (commonly known as a Microplane or zester).
    Belle Duchene, Better Homes & Gardens, 19 Jan. 2023
  • And on that dividing line sits the Holy Name rotary, where voters from two precincts were deadlocked on their vote in September.
    BostonGlobe.com, 30 Oct. 2021
  • Instead, a version of the rotary will act as a range extender in one of two electric vehicles the brand will debut for 2020.
    Andrew Moseman, Popular Mechanics, 2 Oct. 2018
  • It should be turned into a roundabout (also known as a traffic circle or rotary).
    Time, 17 July 2023
  • Presuming its final design comes to fruition, the Szorenyi faces an existential question: What is the rotary's place in the world?
    Matthew Jancer, Popular Mechanics, 18 Jan. 2019
  • However, as ice turned the roads slick, the family became stuck at a rotary by the airport, CNN reported.
    Shealagh Sullivan, BostonGlobe.com, 27 Dec. 2022
  • In Abbeville last year, some Yellow Vest protesters first gathered at one of the town’s biggest rotaries, near a major shopping mall.
    BostonGlobe.com, 26 Dec. 2019
  • Specifically, ten Brink said the rotary could become a range extender for an electric car in 2019, and for now that’s just a rumor.
    Matthew Jancer, Popular Mechanics, 21 May 2018
  • And the console rotary knob makes way for a more contemporary-looking touchpad.
    Jens Meiners, Car and Driver, 12 Aug. 2020
  • In 1867, Bullock jammed his leg in one of the machines while installing a web rotary press for the Philadelphia Public Ledger newspaper.
    Zoey Lyttle, Peoplemag, 27 June 2023
  • The rotary is still quite attractive to us, because there is so much potential for improvement.
    Csaba Csere, Car and Driver, 1 Feb. 2023
  • This vast swath of land, largely a tank farm today, encompasses four parcels that together reach from the Sweetser Circle rotary at routes 16 and 99 all the way to the Mystic River.
    BostonGlobe.com, 24 Sep. 2021
  • There are a couple of road crossings, some spots in Orleans and Wellfleet with slight grades, and a bicycle rotary in Harwich (so Massachusetts)!
    Pamela Wright, BostonGlobe.com, 2 June 2022
  • Only Mazda really went for it, using rotaries mostly famously in sports cars such as the RX-7 and grand tourers such as the Cosmo.
    Matthew Jancer, Popular Mechanics, 18 Jan. 2019
  • And there was the hypnotizingly wonderful rotary die cutter, which sucked up cardboard and sent a cutting die across the surface.
    Matthew Shaer, New York Times, 28 Nov. 2022
  • The statue’s 40-foot granite pedestal will remain onsite, in the middle of a grassy rotary on Richmond’s Monument Avenue, but crews will remove plaques affixed to its base.
    Joe Walsh, Forbes, 6 Sep. 2021
  • Due to Eno's efforts, things such as speed limits, right-of-way rules at intersections and rotaries, pavement markings, one way streets and turn signals have been codified to law.
    Courant Community, 5 June 2017
  • With roundabouts, drivers approaching to enter the flow of traffic yield to cars already in the roundabout, but rotaries usually have two to three lanes with outside lane that allows cars to merge right away.
    Monroe Trombly, Cincinnati.com, 12 Sep. 2017
  • The system can also be operated by a large rotary knob on the center console as well as through gesture controls that are more gimmicky than useful.
    Eric Stafford, Car and Driver, 27 Jan. 2023

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