How to Use potentiality in a Sentence

potentiality

noun
Definition of potentialitynext
Synonyms for potentialitynext
  • There was no discussion of what use, if any, to make of my new potentiality.
    — Joseph O’Neill, The New Yorker, 4 Nov. 2019
  • Each figure played a key role in shaping an evocative notion of the region’s sense of potentiality.
    — Lynell George, Los Angeles Times, 7 Sep. 2019
  • The modern day loan system is botched, and needs addressing if prodigious young talents are to reach their full potentialities.
    — SI.com, 15 Apr. 2017
  • The year 1947 did mark a tipping point between the savagery of the immediate past and the tentative stirrings of postwar potentialities.
    — Dagmar Herzog, New York Times, 6 Apr. 2018
  • And that one, when connected to that other one, sparks something: an energy, a knowledge, a potentiality that is so much bigger than that one.
    — Evan Nicole Brown, The Hollywood Reporter, 26 July 2022
  • That could also determine whether there are charges in connection with the other statutes there -- potentiality (ph).
    — ABC News, 28 Aug. 2022
  • Additionally, with the expansion of the tournament from 32 teams to 48 teams, this debate has caught alight with the potentiality of seeing an increase in teams of lesser quality.
    — SI.com, 2 July 2018
  • For now, those future victims are potentiality burrowed away in one figure: 69 million.
    — Libby Lewis, Slate Magazine, 11 Aug. 2017
  • There has never really been a timeline in Ms. Atkinson’s novels, but rather a timescape, a realm in which everything exists at once in potentiality and only gradually emerges as a story that is as much quandary as plot.
    — Katherine A. Powers, WSJ, 20 Sep. 2018
  • Somewhere between the billionaires and the flameouts, there are less dramatic potentialities.
    — Vauhini Vara, WIRED, 23 May 2017
  • The cartoon landscape is a model of the marvelous that’s an alibi for something much more malign: a world where infinite potentiality is experienced as terror.
    — Adam Thirlwell, The New York Review of Books, 3 Aug. 2020
  • And there is also an undercurrent of resentment that newcomers should be telling veteran ranchers about the potentialities of the land in southern Wasco County.
    — David Sarasohn, The New Republic, 12 Apr. 2018
  • Possibly, but entwined with this theme of curiosity is the potentiality that these tales are begging readers to also consider the importance of obedience and trust.
    — Sarah Schutte, National Review, 12 Sep. 2021
  • The net effect of this case is to increase the potentiality for totalitarianism in America.
    — Norman Mailer, Daily Intelligencer, 30 June 2017
  • Closely aligned to potentiality, virtual referred to the internal, but as yet unexpressed, capacities of a thing.
    — Jacob Brogan, Slate Magazine, 1 Sep. 2017
  • Poland gleamed as an unknown, an enticing potentiality.
    — Thomas Swick, Longreads, 5 July 2018
  • Life becomes fuller, richer, but also, in one important arena, decided, and robbed of enticing potentialities.
    — Thomas Swick, Longreads, 5 July 2018
  • The Paris Saint-Germain academy graduate screened his backline effectively and with commitment, meaning that those ahead of him could play freely and confidently without worrying about the potentiality of danger behind them.
    — SI.com, 19 Apr. 2018
  • He was immediately captivated by the potentiality of computer software to do good in the world, citing Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg’s respective journeys to connect people via technology.
    — Steven Aquino, Forbes, 13 Feb. 2023
  • Such settings serve Appelfeld as a fictional petri dish where certain human potentialities can be developed to an extreme, while excusing the novelist from the sometimes dreary obligations of social realism.
    — Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker, 2 Mar. 2020
  • Marco Silva is the astute mind that can turn potentiality into actuality, especially with the talent littering his squad.
    — SI.com, 6 June 2019
  • Tempted by the potentialities of technology to create the thoroughly modern totalitarian state with himself at the center, Mr. Xi is rapidly undermining the openness that lifted China out of poverty.
    — Holman W. Jenkins, WSJ, 23 Oct. 2018
  • Finding a solution to a puzzle with that degree of complexity, and among billions of potentialities, involves a degree of abstract thinking that, researchers say, begins to approximate human reasoning and decision-making.
    — Washington Post, 18 Oct. 2019
  • This legislation established the federal drug classification schedule, which categorized certain drugs within five total groups based on their medical use and potentiality for abuse.
    — David Cannady, sun-sentinel.com, 23 Sep. 2021
  • Historically Black Colleges and Universities are both incubators and accelerators of their students’ talent, intelligence and potentiality in a daily immersion in their heritage and investment in their future.
    — Janelle Harris Dixon, Smithsonian Magazine, 8 Feb. 2021
  • Is academic jargon verily so problematical vis-à-vis its labyrinthine potentialities qua trans-resistive reactionings?
    — Rebecca Schuman, Slate Magazine, 26 Jan. 2017

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