How to Use free-floating in a Sentence

free-floating

adjective
  • But free-floating balloons were, and still are, at the mercy of the winds.
    — Erik Ofgang, Smithsonian Magazine, 11 June 2024
  • But in opera, a score isn’t just free-floating abstraction.
    — Theater Critic, San Francisco Chronicle, 21 Feb. 2026
  • The mix turned out to be a soup of free-floating lymphoma cells that were shed by the tumor.
    — Brian Murphy, Washington Post, 15 Feb. 2024
  • The silica was then left free-floating as the X-ray burst hit it.
    — Greg Wehner, Fox News, 24 Sep. 2024
  • The search turned up free-floating objects roughly two to three times the mass of Jupiter.
    — Robert Lea, Space.com, 14 Mar. 2025
  • Lime's fleets are largely free-floating, which has attracted ire.
    — Julian Chokkattu, WIRED, 30 July 2024
  • The rope that the fishermen severed was free-floating — as is common with creel gear.
    — Brendan Rascius, Miami Herald, 12 Feb. 2025
  • Pack ice, a type of free-floating ice that drifts on the open ocean, surrounds Antarctica.
    — Mindy Weisberger, CNN Money, 6 Oct. 2025
  • Typical lures include bead rigs and egg sacs to mimic free-floating eggs that steelhead key in on.
    — Max Inchausti, Field & Stream, 12 June 2024
  • Astronomers, who sometimes like to kill fun, call these worlds free-floating planets, which is not nearly as cool a term.
    — Phil Plait, Scientific American, 3 Apr. 2025
  • This left behind an abundance of free-floating oxygen atoms for organisms to use.
    — Tara Wu, Smithsonian Magazine, 15 May 2024
  • Astronomers are now beginning to discover very many of these free-floating worlds.
    — Keith Cooper, Space.com, 24 Aug. 2026
  • These places have long been associated with boredom, with a vague, free-floating malaise.
    — Julie Beck, The Atlantic, 2 Apr. 2024
  • The base is also magnetic, so your razor won’t be free-floating around the hotel bathroom.
    — Sara Coughlin, Allure, 5 July 2026
  • And surprisingly, these objects are free-floating, adrift in space and unattached to any star.
    — Phil Plait, Scientific American, 20 Oct. 2023
  • If luck holds, the then free-floating embryo develops into a larvae, which settles on a reef and begins life as a coral polyp.
    — Denise Hruby, Miami Herald, 29 Aug. 2025
  • Casual comments laced with free-floating prejudice are a constant in the teachers’ room.
    — David Fear, Rolling Stone, 10 June 2023
  • Observations made with the telescope will help astronomers understand how these free-floating worlds evolve.
    — Katie Hunt, CNN, 31 Aug. 2024
  • But if his gestures were free-floating, his linguistic prowess remained dense and dexterous.
    — Sarah Moroz, Pitchfork, 12 Nov. 2025
  • The polyps later morph into the recognizable, free-floating jellyfish forms known as medusas.
    — Brian Handwerk, Smithsonian Magazine, 11 Dec. 2024
  • Instead of definition, the staging gives us a muddle of free-floating feeling.
    — Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times, 11 Oct. 2024
  • Smaller objects can form in these nebulae as well, including free-floating planets.
    — Phil Plait, Scientific American, 14 June 2024
  • That makes the pollutants easier to collect than free-floating particles.
    — Byrobin Donovan, science.org, 1 June 2023
  • But the key to making this work is a free-floating efficiency parameter – a dial that controls the strength of the outburst.
    — Paul Sutter, Space.com, 3 May 2026
  • The artist subsequently built a device to support his free-floating canvas, which idled in the water for the rest of the exhibition.
    — Kriston Capps, Washington Post, 3 July 2024
  • That means the 'all-glue' construction isn't going to work, so foldable displays are usually partially glued on and left free-floating around the hinge area.
    — Ron Amadeo, Ars Technica, 22 Apr. 2023
  • But scientists are finding that our bodies are also home to exquisitely tiny rings of free-floating RNA.
    — Carl Zimmer, New York Times, 19 Feb. 2025
  • The bottom edge of the display is attached to the phone, and a portion of the top is attached to the phone, but the middle has to be free-floating for the sliding mechanism to work.
    — Ron Amadeo, Ars Technica, 1 Mar. 2023
  • Thus, if free-floating planetary mass objects are indeed brown dwarfs, the sheer number of them seen as binary systems is difficult to explain.
    — Robert Lea, Space.com, 10 Mar. 2025
  • Outside that context, and free-floating on social media, this content attracted the ire of those who specifically study cannabis and its effects on the brain and body.
    — Miles Klee, Rolling Stone, 8 May 2024

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