as in incomplete
lacking some necessary part
the historical record of this pharaoh's life and reign is fragmentary at best
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Recent Examples of fragmentary
Phylogenetic analyses yield conflicting results: some position it near the base of squamates, others as a distant relative separate from both major lizard clades and snakes, highlighting the limits of fragmentary amber fossils.
—
Scott Travers, Forbes.com, 29 Apr. 2025
Whereas Liliana’s Invincible Summer is emotional, sincere, and relatively easy to follow, Death Takes Me is cerebral, fragmentary, and disorienting.
—Nicolás Medina Mora, The Atlantic, 13 Mar. 2025
McBurney’s bridge is fragmentary, sounding neither quite like Mussorgsky nor like an original piece.
—Jeffrey Arlo Brown, New York Times, 12 Apr. 2025
Though fugitive and fragmentary, the events in the Gospels take place on a fixed historical time line.
—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 24 Mar. 2025
See All Example Sentences for fragmentary
Scott Travers, Forbes.com, 29 Apr. 2025
Whereas Liliana’s Invincible Summer is emotional, sincere, and relatively easy to follow, Death Takes Me is cerebral, fragmentary, and disorienting.
—Nicolás Medina Mora, The Atlantic, 13 Mar. 2025
McBurney’s bridge is fragmentary, sounding neither quite like Mussorgsky nor like an original piece.
—Jeffrey Arlo Brown, New York Times, 12 Apr. 2025
Though fugitive and fragmentary, the events in the Gospels take place on a fixed historical time line.
—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 24 Mar. 2025
See All Example Sentences for fragmentary
Recent Examples of Synonyms for fragmentary
incomplete
Adjective
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Sandbox testing with dummy data doesn't reveal how agents behave when faced with the messy realities of actual business operations, like incomplete datasets, legacy system quirks or the subtle contextual cues that guide human decision making.—
Olga Megorskaya,
Forbes.com,
25 July 2025
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When one immigration lawyer objected that the court record would be incomplete without the government attorney’s name, Xu reportedly refused to provide it.—
Cassandra Burke Robertson,
The Conversation,
23 July 2025
Cite this Entry
“Fragmentary.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/fragmentary. Accessed 8 Aug. 2025.
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