Definition of SUM TOTAL

Examples of sum total in a Sentence

in this case the sum total of physical evidence that a crime has been committed wouldn't fill a thimble

Recent Examples on the Web

Having become a shell of a woman, our poor children would have received the sum total of my cavernous insecurity. — Reema Zaman, Vogue, "The Woman I Would Have Been Had I Let Myself Love You," 13 Feb. 2019 And while Congress has allocated a few billion dollars here and there to address the crisis in recent years, the sum total falls short of the tens of billions experts say is needed to quickly reverse the opioid epidemic. — German Lopez, Vox, "Trump just signed a bipartisan bill to confront the opioid epidemic," 24 Oct. 2018 Bitcoin, while not the only cryptocurrency that functions on this basic premise, is greedier than most of its crypto-counterparts—the sum total of Bitcoin's electricity consumption slightly trails the entire country of Denmark. — Sam Blum, Popular Mechanics, "Mining For Bitcoin Can Require More Energy Than Actually Mining," 6 Nov. 2018 But the rampant psychological reductivism of the present age—which defines a man as the sum total of his drives and aversions—had not set in yet in Melville’s day. — James Gardner, WSJ, "Debilitated, But Infinitely Human," 31 Aug. 2018 The sum total of Gracia’s technical responsibilities is to organize practice, send out the team for matches, and direct those 90 minutes. — WSJ, "Watford’s Premier League Survival Strategy: Don’t Let the Coach Get Too Comfortable," 14 Sep. 2018 The sum total of legal caviar production in the world in 2010 was estimated at 71 tons, of which a mere eight tons were taken from wild fish. — David Samuels, Town & Country, "One Bad Egg," 18 Oct. 2013 The sum total of the preparation was a single trip by Trump’s national-security adviser, John Bolton, to Moscow. — James Hohmann, Washington Post, "The Daily 202: GOP candidates caught in a bind on Medicaid," 13 July 2018 But that’s the sum total of the strategy: There seems to be no plan besides the unwavering belief that escalating economic pressure will eventually break the Chinese. — Alex Shephard, The New Republic, "Why Trump Might Lose His Trade War With China," 9 July 2018

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