spherical
adjective
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Something spherical is like a sphere in being round, or more or less round, in three dimensions. Apples and oranges are both spherical, for example, even though they're never perfectly round. A spheroid has a roughly spherical shape; so an asteroid, for instance, is often spheroidal—fairly round, but lumpy.
Examples of spherical in a Sentence
Cynthia Sass, Mph, Health, 13 Apr. 2024
An abundance of evidence demonstrates the Earth is spherical in shape – including images of the planet taken from outer space.
—Kim Breen, USA TODAY, 2 Apr. 2024
Two of them had a cylindrical shape while the third was spherical.
—Moira Ritter, Miami Herald, 5 Mar. 2024
Eggs laid in the water tend to be smaller and more spherical.
—Quanta Magazine, 21 Feb. 2024
Under the sapphire crystal a performance indicator sits between 2 and 3 o’clock and a spherical moon-phase indicator lies at 6 o’clock.
—Rachel Cormack, Robb Report, 2 Apr. 2024
The bowl cupped a spherical cloud of iron that acted as a radiator for the waste heat emitted by Paradise’s quadrillions of computing modules.
—Karl Schroeder, IEEE Spectrum, 24 Feb. 2024
When part of a cloud reaches some critical density, gravity causes that dense, roughly spherical region to collapse into a flattened, whirling protoplanetary disk with a nascent, glowing star at its center.
—Shannon Hall, Scientific American, 23 Feb. 2024
The majority of the cats started fetching before their first birthday, at an average age of 7 months, and the most popular fetching items included toys, cosmetics and spherical objects, with miscellaneous items and arts and crafts supplies following behind.
—Sarah Kuta, Smithsonian Magazine, 18 Dec. 2023
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'spherical.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Dictionary Entries Near spherical
Cite this Entry
“Spherical.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spherical. Accessed 18 Apr. 2024.
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spherical
adjective
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