How to Use determinative in a Sentence

determinative

adjective

• As the horse race shows, those views may not be determinative.
  — Gary Langer, ABC News, 11 July 2024
• Over the course of the next few days will be determinative in terms of our ability to get out of this.
  — Los Angeles Times, 12 Oct. 2019
• But Davis told me the shape and size of your arch is not as determinative as some people think.
  — Laura Lancaster, Outdoor Life, 11 Apr. 2024
• But that factor would not be determinative alone.
  — Isaac Chotiner, New Yorker, 6 Oct. 2025
• Under Senate rules, a member who is not present cannot cast the determinative vote.
  — Daniella Diaz, CNN, 24 Apr. 2018
• Those vote shares could be small but determinative in an election likely to be decided on the margins.
  — Ashley Lopez, NPR, 25 Sep. 2024
• And what happens within the first 48 hours is often determinative as to whether that child is going to be found alive.
  — ABC News, 17 Mar. 2023
• Of course, Romney went on to win the nomination that year, so his gaffe wasn't determinative.
  — Chris Cillizza, CNN, 11 May 2021
• That naturally leads to early clues, even if those clues aren’t determinative.
  — Parker Gabriel, Denver Post, 7 May 2025
• The idea here—that film criticism moves audiences at the margin but isn’t determinative—has always been true.
  — Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, 8 Sep. 2017
• Doesn’t that mean race will be determinative in some cases, Chief Justice Roberts asked.
  — The Editorial Board, WSJ, 31 Oct. 2022
• Or were 99 mile-an-hour winds determinative and there was really no firefight that could've been more meaningful?
  — NBC News, 12 Jan. 2025
• Current law permits schools to consider an applicant’s race, but not use it as a determinative factor.
  — Melissa Korn, WSJ, 14 June 2021
• That’s one of the reasons that some are arguing today that costs of running credit scores somehow plays a determinative role in driving prices up.
  — Paul Weinstein Jr., Forbes, 20 Nov. 2024
• No single factor is determinative, and all facts and circumstances should be considered.
  — Peter J Reilly, Forbes, 1 July 2022
• Former manufacturing towns are unpredictable and could be the most determinative places in the state.
  — Tribune News Service, Boston Herald, 15 Oct. 2024
• But bad sportsmanship is too subjective a concept on which to base a potentially outcome-determinative penalty such as the loss of a game in a tennis match.
  — Alan M. Dershowitz, WSJ, 13 Sep. 2018
• Court composition is of course not determinative.
  — London Business School, Forbes.com, 1 Sep. 2025
• One is determinative, and the architects of that story already know the morality contained in the story, with the objective to lay out a moral system.
  — Etan Vlessing, HollywoodReporter, 7 Sep. 2025
• Trump’s endorsement was helpful but not determinative.
  — Joe Garofoli, San Francisco Chronicle, 11 Apr. 2026
• The years between the late teens and early 30s are consequential for everyone, but for an athlete, those years are determinative.
  — Mick Lasalle, San Francisco Chronicle, 19 Apr. 2024
• Four borough presidents are now also on board, but the actual determinative vote will come later this year with a vote by the City Council.
  — New York Daily News Editorial Board, New York Daily News, 12 July 2024
• Nevada is a state where Hispanic voters' preferences may prove determinative in the swing state's critical races.
  — Allan Smith, NBC News, 22 Aug. 2022
• For a determinative level of fraud to occur, thousands of election workers, our neighbors, would need to be complicit and go undetected.
  — Scott Peters, San Diego Union-Tribune, 15 Nov. 2024
• In Middle English, the term referred to the determinative phase of an illness, the point from which one either recovers to health or declines to death.
  — Spencer Strub, The New York Review of Books, 25 Mar. 2020
• Many experts today regard the process as less determinative and more dynamic, but there is near-universal agreement that grief is a process, not a one-time, overnight phenomenon.
  — Todd S. Purdum, STAT, 9 Dec. 2020
• Opponents will argue, too, that higher state taxes will make rich people flee the state, though there is plenty of evidence that taxes are not determinative in such decisions.
  — BostonGlobe.com, 9 June 2021
• McCain’s support for it — to have been the determinative factor in McCain’s defeat.
  — Geoffrey Kabaservice, Washington Post, 16 Oct. 2020
• There is little reason to think that this arrangement had any determinative effect on the outcome of the 2016 primary.
  — Eric Levitz, Daily Intelligencer, 3 Nov. 2017
• The process wasn’t determinative — clearly, since Porter (and many others) remained in their positions despite having failed to get clearance approval.
  — Philip Bump, Washington Post, 19 Mar. 2018