revolutionary

adjective rev·o·lu·tion·ary \ ˌre-və-ˈlü-shə-ˌner-ē \

Updated on: 20 Apr 2018

Definition of revolutionary

1 a : of, relating to, or constituting a revolution

revolutionary war

b : tending to or promoting revolution

c : constituting or bringing about a major or fundamental change

a revolutionary new product

2 capitalized : of or relating to the American Revolution or to the period in which it occurred

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revolutionarily

play \ˌre-və-ˌlü-shə-ˈner-ə-lē\ adverb

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revolutionariness

play \ˌre-və-ˈlü-shə-ˌner-ē-nəs\ noun

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Examples of revolutionary in a Sentence

a candidate with a lot of crazy, revolutionary ideas that no one seems to be going for
revolutionary forces that were soundly defeated before reaching the capital

Recent Examples of revolutionary from the Web

Theranos had claimed to have developed revolutionary technology that could diagnose disease with tiny pinpricks of blood, but those claims were later shown to be largely overblown.

— sy mukherjee, Fortune, "Report: Theranos Just Laid Off the Vast Majority of Its Employees," 10 Apr. 2018
Not long after her birth, Leon Kass, a prominent biologist and ethicist at the University of Chicago, wrung his hands about the then-revolutionary technology of joining sperm and egg outside the body.

— jason pontin, WIRED, "Science Is Getting Us Closer to the End of Infertility," 27 Mar. 2018
The settlement comes two years after the SEC, prompted by a Wall Street Journal investigation, began looking into claims that Theranos had made about its potentially revolutionary blood-testing technology.

— ken sweet, BostonGlobe.com, "Holmes surrenders Theranos, pays $500K after ‘massive fraud’," 14 Mar. 2018
Blockchain is a potentially revolutionary technology for all sorts of industries, from finance to food safety, social media and retail.

— molly schuetz, Bloomberg.com, "Startup Codex Brings Blockchain to Art With Backing From Pantera," 28 Feb. 2018
Alevo arrived in Cabarrus County in 2014 with great fanfare, vowing to create hundreds of jobs through its revolutionary energy-storage technology on the site of a former Philip Morris cigarette factory.

— rick rothacker, charlotteobserver, "Production unlikely to resume at big battery factory in Concord, filing shows," 15 Feb. 2018
Since the 1990s, two revolutionary technologies have enabled telescopes to measure the cosmos with more precision than ever before.

— jay bennett, Popular Mechanics, "The Deep Space Eye in the Desert," 14 Feb. 2018
The radical upsurge in business and consumer confidence is not revolutionary but almost natural.

— victor davis hanson, National Review, "President Nobama," 16 Jan. 2018
How much of the heated rhetoric points to revolutionary change, and how much is just hype?

— alison gopnik, Scientific American, "An AI That Knows the World Like Children Do," 1 June 2017

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'revolutionary.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

First Known Use of revolutionary

1718

in the meaning defined at sense 1a

See Words from the same year

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revolutionary Synonyms

Other History Terms

agonistic, carpetbagger, enceinte, fief, historiography, paladin

revolutionary

noun

Definition of revolutionary

plural revolutionaries

1 : one engaged in a revolution

2 : an advocate or adherent of revolutionary doctrines

See revolutionary defined for English-language learners

Examples of revolutionary in a Sentence

after the collapse of the Russian monarchy, the moderate socialists briefly governed until being overthrown by the Bolshevik revolutionaries
at first the government was not worried about this small band of unarmed revolutionaries