syntactic

adjective

syn·tac·tic | \ sin-ˈtak-tik

How to pronounce syntactic (audio)

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variants: or syntactical \ sin-ˈtak-ti-kəl

How to pronounce syntactic (audio)

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Definition of syntactic

: of, relating to, or according to the rules of syntax or syntactics

Other Words from syntactic Example Sentences Learn More about syntactic

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Examples of syntactic in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web Enjambment, when a syntactic unit overflows from one line to the next, is a bedrock poetic practice, one that endows poets with the capacity to make and remake meaning. — Adam Bradley, New York Times, "The Artists Dismantling the Barriers Between Rap and Poetry," 4 Mar. 2021 Only in poetry is there so much flexibility and freedom to actually use those kind of pair words together that make intuitive sense but don’t make syntactic sense. — Tara Duggan, SFChronicle.com, "Alice Waters and daughter Fanny Singer in Q&A about Singer’s memoir of life with Bay Area legend," 30 Mar. 2020 Last Wednesday, with a pandemic spiking and the economy plummeting, Senator Charles Schumer finally lost his cool and dispensed with syntactic best practices in the name of urgency. — David Roth, The New Republic, "America’s Diseased Politics," 24 Mar. 2020 Most of its bulk consists of a highly specialized syntactic foam—made of tiny ceramic spheres suspended in polymer resin—the only material able to provide buoyancy while remaining uncrushable. — Susan Casey, Outside Online, "One Man's Wild Quest to Reach the Bottom of Every Ocean," 22 Oct. 2019 Language, too, has a recursive structure in which a syntactic category such as a sentence can contain other sentence clauses that in turn can contain clauses themselves, and so on. — Quanta Magazine, "The Bulldogs That Bulldogs Fight," 17 Apr. 2019 Shi and others recruited and hired current and former employees of the engineering firm in Houston, including Liu, to aid CBMF's capability to make syntactic foam. — Jose R. Gonzalez, Houston Chronicle, "Houston man indicted for 'vast criminal conspiracy' to aid China-owned companies," 27 Apr. 2018 Flipping their syntactic form does nothing to their semantic role. — The Economist, "The weasel voice in journalism," 24 May 2018 But from inside the books, the syntactic icing is so clearly a protective measure, a droll band-aid. — Rachel Syme, The New Republic, "Is Patrick Melrose Too Glamorous?," 17 May 2018

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

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Cite this Entry

“Syntactic.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/syntactic. Accessed 13 May. 2021.

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More Definitions for syntactic

syntactic

adjective

English Language Learners Definition of syntactic

linguistics : of or relating to syntax

See the full definition for syntactic in the English Language Learners Dictionary

syntactic

adjective

syn·tac·tic | \ sin-ˈtak-tik

\

variants: or syntactical \ -ti-kəl

How to pronounce syntactic (audio)

\

Medical Definition of syntactic

: of or relating to syntactics

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