How to Use transitive in a Sentence

transitive

adjective

• In “I like pie” and “She makes hats,” the verbs “like” and “makes” are transitive.
• Arguments based in transitive nature can get down in the weeds.
  — Fletcher Page, Cincinnati.com, 5 Dec. 2019
• The verb lay, lay, laid, meaning to place, is a transitive verb, requiring an object.
  — Sun Sentinel Editorial Board, Sun Sentinel, 9 Jan. 2025
• After all, Google has become a transitive verb thanks to its search dominance.
  — Tom Warren, The Verge, 5 June 2023
• But by the transitive property, that would arguably make Butler’s style icon Smith as well.
  — Tom Smyth, Vulture, 23 Feb. 2024
• Of course there is no such direct transitive property at work in sports, and those questions are patently unanswerable.
  — Globe Staff, BostonGlobe.com, 2 June 2023
• Mathematicians have never found an example of a transitive graph whose growth falls in this range.
  — Quanta Magazine, 18 Dec. 2023
• By the transitive property of celebrity, actors can be politicians.
  — Kenzie Bryant, Vanities, 20 Apr. 2017
• For three dice, transitive and intransitive dice are equally common.
  — Jack Murtagh, Scientific American, 19 Sep. 2023
• By the transitive property, a room full of Colombians had come to cheer for an iconic German side.
  — Brad Rickman, Condé Nast Traveler, 15 June 2018
• Therefore, by the transitive property, anyone who is younger than me is definitely a child.
  — Monica McDonough, The New Yorker, 1 Mar. 2023
• By the transitive property of wins, that means the Raiders have a shot at keeping Atlantic’s offense at bay.
  — Adam Lichtenstein, sun-sentinel.com, 8 Sep. 2021
• The transitive property does not exist in football and sports television.
  — Jim Reineking, USA TODAY, 13 Sep. 2024
• By the transitive property, that’d probably make Carolina the best team in the league.
  — Luca Evans, Denver Post, 5 Dec. 2025
• The female hustle rapper has been dishing out her own style of transitive female rap since 2016.
  — Kayla Cockrel, Detroit Free Press, 29 Oct. 2019
• Even better, many of Oprah’s favorites for spring—and mine by the transitive property—are on sale at Amazon.
  — Annie Blackman, InStyle, 27 Feb. 2026
• But there’s a transitive property to approval and confidence.
  — Gal Beckerman, The Atlantic, 15 Nov. 2022
• And if industry dynamics are not transitive across the board, expertise isn’t, either.
  — Bess Levin, The Hive, 30 Mar. 2017
• The sense of destiny that shrouds her characters gives them—and, by some transitive property, the reader—an archaic grandeur of feeling.
  — Alice Gregory, The New Yorker, 9 Nov. 2020
• And by some mysterious, transitive property, the entire apartment looked and felt cleaner.
  — Jenny Hughes, Parents, 28 May 2026
• In one paper, Choi’s team used an algorithm to sift through more than seven hundred movie scripts and count the transitive verbs connoting power and agency.
  — Matthew Hutson, The New Yorker, 5 Apr. 2022
• In the game of sports transitive theory, Notre Dame’s task in beating Boston College today just got tougher.
  — Teddy Greenstein, chicagotribune.com, 16 Sep. 2017
• In fact, the above argument involving the triangle, the rectangle and the square shows that scissors congruence is also transitive.
  — Patrick Honner, Quanta Magazine, 21 Nov. 2022
• By the transitive property, Detroit should be favored over Minnesota.
  — Tyler J. Davis, Detroit Free Press, 25 Sep. 2022
• However, basketball isn’t played by the transitive property.
  — John Hollinger, New York Times, 2 June 2026
• The transitive property Penn State lost to UCLA in Week 6.
  — Steven Louis Goldstein, New York Times, 8 Oct. 2025
• Even those bigwigs paid obeisance to someone and, eventually, by the transitive property of Saudi deference, to the king himself.
  — Graeme Wood, The Atlantic, 3 Mar. 2022
• People with dyscalculia often struggle with transitive inference—a form of deductive reasoning used to derive a relation between items.
  — Jaimie Seaton, Scientific American, 29 Mar. 2024
• To assess the advantages and disadvantages of the options, our brains perform calculations using a certain kind of logic called transitive inference.
  — Lydia Rivers, Discover Magazine, 14 Apr. 2021
• However, West Virginia just handed its archrival a transitive loss to the MAC’s scrappy Ohio.
  — Jason Kirk, New York Times, 14 Sep. 2025