How to Use fathom in a Sentence

fathom

1 of 2 noun
  • The water here is five fathoms deep.
  • Captain Cook filled his logs with notes on the tide, on the time the ebb began each day, the force of the current, the fathoms of water, or lack of water, beneath his ship.
    Erin McKittrick, Alaska Dispatch News, 15 Sep. 2017
  • Dropping 10 fathoms down, below the green waves of the Gulf and back in time to this prehistoric world amounts to a sort of time traveler’s journey.
    AL.com, 25 June 2017
  • Twain's pen name originates from his time working with steamboats: Twain refers to a measure of length known as two fathoms (12 feet).
    Logan Sykes, Town & Country, 30 Nov. 2015
  • Time traveling below the waves Dropping 10 fathoms down, below the green waves of the Gulf and back in time to this prehistoric world amounts to a sort of time traveler's journey.
    Ben Raines, NOLA.com, 25 June 2017
  • That impulse, growing out of one pivotal song, eventually pointed the way to the fathoms of Ocean, the group’s new album, their seventh, which debuts Friday.
    Nancy Kruh, PEOPLE.com, 15 Nov. 2019
  • Get ready to be terrified by the mysterious fathoms below!
    Laura Beck, Cosmopolitan, 27 Jan. 2018
  • But in today’s world of restrictions on size, quantity and season, releasing reef fish has become part of our new reality—as are the challenges of ensuring postrelease survival for an animal pulled up from 20 fathoms.
    Popular Science, 11 Feb. 2020
  • The water here is five fathoms deep.
  • Captain Cook filled his logs with notes on the tide, on the time the ebb began each day, the force of the current, the fathoms of water, or lack of water, beneath his ship.
    Erin McKittrick, Alaska Dispatch News, 15 Sep. 2017
  • Dropping 10 fathoms down, below the green waves of the Gulf and back in time to this prehistoric world amounts to a sort of time traveler’s journey.
    AL.com, 25 June 2017
  • Twain's pen name originates from his time working with steamboats: Twain refers to a measure of length known as two fathoms (12 feet).
    Logan Sykes, Town & Country, 30 Nov. 2015
  • Time traveling below the waves Dropping 10 fathoms down, below the green waves of the Gulf and back in time to this prehistoric world amounts to a sort of time traveler's journey.
    Ben Raines, NOLA.com, 25 June 2017
  • That impulse, growing out of one pivotal song, eventually pointed the way to the fathoms of Ocean, the group’s new album, their seventh, which debuts Friday.
    Nancy Kruh, PEOPLE.com, 15 Nov. 2019
  • Get ready to be terrified by the mysterious fathoms below!
    Laura Beck, Cosmopolitan, 27 Jan. 2018
  • But in today’s world of restrictions on size, quantity and season, releasing reef fish has become part of our new reality—as are the challenges of ensuring postrelease survival for an animal pulled up from 20 fathoms.
    Popular Science, 11 Feb. 2020
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fathom

2 of 2 verb
  • With that in mind, try to fathom what the NBA has in store.
    Bruce Jenkins, San Francisco Chronicle, 6 May 2023
  • It’s hard to fathom Texas Tech will have any votes in the new poll.
    star-telegram, 21 Oct. 2017
  • What happened over the next two weeks is hard to fathom.
    New York Times, 22 May 2022
  • It’s hard to fathom how even his base could get fired up by that.
    San Diego Union-Tribune, 1 Sep. 2019
  • The goal is to be at the top of the mountain, but not many can fathom what that looks like or even how to get there.
    Nishith Rastogi, Forbes, 22 Mar. 2023
  • That’s a pretty long way to fall—one most of us can’t even fathom.
    Tori Latham, Robb Report, 3 Jan. 2023
  • What never seems to get old are moves that are hard to fathom.
    San Diego Union-Tribune, 24 Oct. 2021
  • Meanwhile, the Chiefs slipping to 2-3 is hard to fathom.
    Jeremy Cluff, The Arizona Republic, 4 Oct. 2021
  • It’s hard to fathom where James’ was coming from on this.
    Al Saracevic, SFChronicle.com, 15 Oct. 2019
  • Still, said some gun sellers, the jump from 2019 to last year’s record NICS checks and gun sales was hard to fathom.
    Paul Bedard, Washington Examiner, 4 Jan. 2021
  • To try to fathom it, picture trekking from sea level to the top of the world’s tallest peak, Mount Everest.
    Tree Meinch, Discover Magazine, 27 June 2023
  • No one with an ounce of sense could fathom crashing through this roof.
    Charlie Dent, CNN, 23 Jan. 2023
  • The ripple effects of a season like that are hard to fathom.
    Joel A. Erickson, The Indianapolis Star, 23 Aug. 2020
  • As late as 2000, a return to Boston was still hard to fathom.
    BostonGlobe.com, 5 May 2021
  • It’s hard to fathom how much can change in seven years given how much has changed in the last month.
    Ben Cohen, WSJ, 12 July 2019
  • These next weeks and months will be demanding in ways that are hard to fathom.
    David Remnick, The New Yorker, 5 Apr. 2020
  • In some cases, these systems achieve a scale that’s hard to fathom.
    Michael Greshko, National Geographic, 19 Apr. 2017
  • Much of the show’s conflict revolves around the fact that the aliens can’t fathom that humans bone sometimes.
    Eric Vilas-Boas, Vulture, 5 Apr. 2021
  • A year and a half ago, such a scene seemed impossible to fathom.
    New York Times, 19 Oct. 2021
  • But then, a lot about San Francisco is hard to fathom these days.
    Heather Knight, San Francisco Chronicle, 6 Apr. 2022
  • The couple couldn’t fathom how their lives changed so quickly.
    Joe Mozingo, latimes.com, 3 Sep. 2017
  • Democrats are still in shock about that, and can’t fathom why so many Latinos are pro-recall.
    Los Angeles Times, 17 Aug. 2021
  • That should be music to the ears of Oregon fans who couldn’t fathom why there weren’t more with Herbert.
    oregonlive, 28 Sep. 2020
  • Burrowes, 44, couldn’t fathom there was still a danger, a week after the storm hit.
    Melissa Chan, NBC News, 12 Oct. 2022
  • My mind could hardly fathom what those six words meant.
    Kyra Parrow, Time, 2 Mar. 2018
  • It’s hard to fathom a version of this game where Oregon struggles to score.
    oregonlive, 20 Sep. 2019
  • The women’s lawyers couldn’t fathom why Griess had neglected to bring charges for more than two years.
    Julia Shipley, Rolling Stone, 26 May 2021
  • And Fox has never been able to fathom the idea of Olsen hurting her daughters.
    Peggy O’Hare, ExpressNews.com, 21 Jan. 2021
  • Its size is almost impossible to fathom: a vista of green and tan whose termini are farther from each other than Anchorage is from Miami or Cairo is from Johannesburg.
    Manvir Singh, The New Yorker, 25 Dec. 2023
  • Before it was shot dead, in 2016, Gawker failed the way most digital media properties of the millennial internet failed: by trying to fathom, and build a business model around, something that is unfathomable—the way the internet works.
    Jason Parham, WIRED, 30 Dec. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'fathom.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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