How to Use but what in a Sentence

but what

phrase

• This used to take at least a week, but what follows will take months.
  — Jonas Barck, Forbes.com, 30 June 2026
• The games are huge, of course, but what happens on the days between sometimes seems just as big.
  — Dominick Williams, Kansas City Star, 3 July 2026
• Nobody has a crystal ball, but what are your hopes for the future of Iran?
  — Nick Vivarelli, Variety, 29 June 2026
• There was some very cool work on display, but what is your broad take about the state of play in animation at the moment?
  — Jesse Whittock, Deadline, 6 July 2026
• Debt doesn't just disappear because the person who owed it has died, but what about the interest charges?
  — Angelica Leicht, CBS News, 1 July 2026
• The days of teams signing players on the back of a good performance at one World Cup are gone, but what about two?
  — Nick Miller, New York Times, 4 July 2026
• Stressful things are going to happen, but what’s most important is how people respond to that stress.
  — Helen Carefoot, Flow Space, 6 July 2026
• Planning a bike trip can be simple, but what really matters is the experience on the road.
  — Jim Dobson, Forbes.com, 29 June 2026
• Little remains of the Nennig complex beyond a mosaic floor—but what a floor!
  — Jeff Chu, Travel + Leisure, 6 July 2026
• Traveling in style with your beloved pet has never been more popular, but what happens if an emergency arises?
  — Sylvie Bigar, Forbes.com, 30 June 2026
• What’s most revealing isn’t any one mechanic, but what the game appears designed to normalize.
  — Alison Foreman, IndieWire, 7 July 2026
• The question isn't which voice AI platform will win, but what actually earns a patient's trust in the first place.
  — Saran Siva, Forbes.com, 30 June 2026
• Landing him is a long shot, a half-court heave, but what’s realistically stopping the Heat from taking it?
  — Omar Kelly, Miami Herald, 29 June 2026
• Because, after all, as in all of Haber’s novels, the point is not really what is happening in the world but what is happening in the mind—in this case the mind of the pettiest of tyrants.
  — Literary Hub, Literary Hub, 1 July 2026
• For players and coaches, the break in play might feel like an annoyance when the temperatures do not seem to demand extra hydration, but what are the physical implications of stopping midway through each half?
  — Sarah Shephard, New York Times, 5 July 2026
• Not everything is going to come back at once, not every sector is going to be able to generate the same bipartisan enthusiasm as every other sector, but what is key is to be open to the question of where results have been achieved.
  — Fatma Tanis, NPR, 3 July 2026
• Only members have the right to attend open board meetings under the Open Meeting Act, but what about the owner’s tenants, non-owner spouses, attorneys, children or service providers?
  — Kelly G. Richardson, San Diego Union-Tribune, 7 July 2026
• Bovary is in some sense a morality tale, but what lifts it above didacticism, along with its bone-deep interiority, is that its romantic plotlines are as addictive as the genre works that have ruined poor Emma Bovary.
  — Boris Kachka, The Atlantic, 3 July 2026
• That is not new, but what may be new today is the way that employees need or look for emotional support at work, especially in the face of anxieties about AI, economic uncertainty, and social and political polarization.
  — Holly Corbett, Forbes.com, 1 July 2026
• Speed and sustainability plays a role — these are massive humans colliding at full speed, after all — but what neither Goodell’s 2011 comment nor the NFLPA’s 1990s study could account for were the effects of the rookie wage scale.
  — Jacob Robinson, New York Times, 6 July 2026