Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use alternately in a sentence

40 example sentences · adverb

Alternately means in reciprocal succession; succeeding by turns; in alternate order. Example: “Driving downtown is restricted to bikes with odd and even license plate numbers alternately by day of the month.”

Examples of alternately by meaning

adverbIn reciprocal succession; succeeding by turns; in alternate order.

  • Driving downtown is restricted to bikes with odd and even license plate numbers alternately by day of the month.
  • Well, I can't help noticing that you insult me and then you're polite to me alternately.1970, “The Butcher Who is Alternately Rude and Polite”, in Monty Python's Flying Circus, season 2, episode 5, spoken by Customer (Michael...
  • The 2025 timetable would feature two trains per hour, alternately routed via Kirkcaldy (with 11 intermediate stops) and Dunfermline (14 stops), with journey times ranging between 65 and 81 minutes.2023 November 1, Robert Drysdale, “Leven is nearly back on track...”, in RAIL, number 995, page 58

adverbAlternatively.

  • Or alternately, he could ask the station master to buzz him into the “family” bathroom.2008 July 18, Jennifer 8. Lee, “A ‘Women Only’ Restroom Renovation Tips the Balance at Grand Central”, in The New York Times
  • Westerners have never quite understood the reverence in Japan for fugu, alternately known in English as puffer fish, globefish or blowfish, of the family Tetraodontidae.2020 December 4, Ligaya Mishan, “The Appealing and Potentially Lethal Delicacy That Is Fugu”, in The New York Times Style Magazine

More sentences with alternately

  • Clicking a button will alternately toggle its light on OR off.From the entry toggle
  • Cash is counted by machine, monitored in real time and deposited alternately with SBI and Union Bank.2026 July 13, “How big temples guard their donations”, in India Today, volume 51, number 27, page 30. From the entry hundi
  • The multicultural, multiamorous group of competitive young workaholics alternately getting in one another’s faces and pants.2015 September 24, James Poniewozik, “Review: ‘Quantico’ Flips Between Jousting F.B.I. Recruits and a Terrorist Attack”, in New York Times. From the entry multiamorous
  • With Hit Girl, Moretz is this year's It Girl, alternately sweet, savage and scary.2010, David Germain, Hilarious ‘Kick-Ass’ delivers bloody fun, Associated Press. From the entry it
  • A: S-I-M-O-N (alternately opens and shuts the device as he or she says each letter).2006, Andrew Wright, David Betteridge, Michael Buckby, Games for Language Learning, page 137. From the entry fortune teller
  • Alternately add the floury salty mixture and the buttermilky banana mash to the first eggy sugary mixture.1998 October 15, “Cooker’s corner: Home Ec for Hop kids”, in The Johns Hopkins News-Letter, volume CIII, number 7, [Baltimore, Md.]: [T]he…. From the entry buttermilky
  • Silver star alternately flashing red and green, moving in slow circular motion.1983, Stan Seers, UFOs, the Case for Scientific Myopia, page 103. From the entry wthr
  • They will be alternately manual workers and officials, so that nobody will become a bureaucrat.1978 [1976], Leszek Kołakowski, translated by P[aul] S[teven] Falla, Main Currents of Marxism, volume II: The Golden Age, Oxford…. From the entry manual
  • The patient felt unable to tolerate his alternately seductive and passive, overrestrained behavior.1959, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, page 143. From the entry overrestrained
  • Canwell and Houston, alternately patronizing and insulting, played good cop-bad cop with Rader; both clearly regarded his explanations as academic double-talk.1997, Pacific Northwest Quarterly. From the entry good cop-bad cop
  • He is alternately sinister and coy, megalomaniacal and vulnerable.1992 February 2, S.H. Chua, “Cars, Guns and Go-Go Chicks”, in Gay Community News, volume 19, number 28, page 7. From the entry megalomaniacal
  • Others will alternately shake their heads and guffaw.1950 March, Francis Towner Towner Laney, “Fanzine Scope”, in Spacewarp, number 36, archived from the original on 24 Sep 2015, pages 10–17. From the entry fuggheaded
  • Alternately the world seems bright and opportuneless.1938, The Gamma Alpha Record, page 90. From the entry opportuneless
  • Alternately, the variation in motor neuron number may be trivial and have little functional impact, because crustacean muscles generally have sparse polyneuronal innervation.2015, Zen Faulkes, M Fabiana Kubke, “Motor neurons in the escape response circuit of white shrimp (Litopenaeus setiferus)”, in PeerJ…. From the entry polyneuronal
  • Alternately, if you prefer chain-store shopping to drugs or peace, there is a presoftened T-shirt that says merely SOHO, in a distressed font.2009 May 7, Cintra Wilson, “Is There a Setting for High Strung?”, in New York Times. From the entry presoftened
  • The krogan have had a love-hate relationship with varren for millennia, alternately fighting them for territory and embracing them as treasured companions.2008, BioWare, Mass Effect (Science Fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →ISBN, →OCLC, PC, scene: Varren Codex entry. From the entry companion
  • He described her alternately as a balancelle, tartane, or felucca, but furnished her with two masts; boats of these types are single-masted.2007, Zdzisław Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, Camden House, →ISBN, page 60. From the entry balancelle
  • To avoid excessive cutting, the bond is arranged as shown in the figure, i.e. two half-bats and a one-brick bonder placed alternately.2006, J. C. Hodge, Malcolm Thorpe, Brickwork for Apprentices, page 97. From the entry bonder
  • Tiepolo ordered two vast toasted cheeses and a jug of wine, and we alternately seared and cooled our lips until we were satisfied and tipsy.2002, Rhys Hughes, Nowhere Near Milkwood, page 49. From the entry toasted cheese
  • He alternately shocks his readers and provides relief from the very shocks he administers: Agathocles has virtù but cannot be said to have virtù.1996, Harvey C[laflin] Mansfield[, Jr.], Machiavelli's Virtue, Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, pages 6–7. From the entry vertu
  • Larry went about alternately urging Margo to disguise herself as a peasant and fly to Peter’s arms, or to stop behaving like Camille.1956, Gerald Durrell, chapter 12, in My Family and Other Animals, London: Penguin, page 172. From the entry Camille
  • The signal officer was looking wise over something that boomed and buzzed alternately; the machine-gun officer may, or may not, have been enjoying another toothful.1917, H. C. McNeile, No Man's Land. From the entry toothful
  • Two iron structures are fitted alternately into the machine; they resemble the ordinary scalding copper, but are flat bottomed and perforated to admit steam.1900, W. M. Webb, “Sterilisers”, in The Agricultural Journal, volume II, page 648. From the entry flat bottomed
  • For example, you may serve a patron a 12 oz sleeve of beer and a 5 oz glass of wine (or alternately 1.5 oz spirits) at the same time.2022 June, Manufacturer Terms and Conditions. From the entry sleeve
  • Rubio his trademark New Jersey treatment: He unleashed a series of rapid-fire, acid-tongued attacks on the man standing four podiums to his right, alternately looking directly at Mr.2016 February 7, Michael Barbaro, “Once Impervious, Marco Rubio Is Diminished by a Caustic Chris Christie”, in The New York Times. From the entry acid-tongued
  • Painted in garish colours, they alternately depict scenes from Palestinian life, weddings, Iftar feasts and suchlike, and Surrealist amalgams of martyrs and monsters, including a golemlike figure inscribed ‘Pinochet’.2015 August 26, Joshua Mack, “Sharjah Biennial 12”, in ArtReview, archived from the original on 19 Mar 2024. From the entry golemlike
  • Another aspect highlighted in the second vignette is that participation even without discrepancies, as seen in the first vignette, involves participants exploiting an alternately 'augmented' or 'disaugmented' view.2011 January 4, Stuart Reeves, Designing Interfaces in Public Settings: Understanding the Role of the Spectator in Human-Computer…. From the entry disaugment
  • However, other phylloxerans can be seriously damaging to other woody plants, notably the grape phylloxera, Daktulosphaira vitifoliae (Fitch), that produces, alternately, leaf galls and root galls on grape vines.2008, “Shade Tree Arthropods and Their Management”, in John L. Capinera, editor, Encyclopedia of Entomology, volume 4, page 3363. From the entry phylloxeran
  • Larry and Andy Wachowski lay it on thick in "Speed Racer," a frenetic, densely layered, narratively scrambled blob of moviemaking that will leave viewers alternately baffled and sensorially stunned.2008 May 9, Ann Hornaday, “'Speed Racer': Take a Detour”, in The Washington Post. From the entry sensorially
  • For many located in central cities, the notion of economic migration is distant, despite economic theories of the nation as a marketplace with locales alternately attracting and disattracting workers.1999, Karen A. Woodrow-Lafield, “Labor Migration, Family Integration, and the New America”, in David W. Haines, Karen E. Rosenblum…. From the entry disattract
  • Alternately, it was proposed that the reverse processes of sigmatism (the reverse of lambdacism) and zetacism (the reverse of rhotacism) may more accurately describe the alternations seen.1997, Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics, volumes 19-21, page 63. From the entry zetacism
  • While the stories and lives on the screen are alternately moving and funny, an unspoken question arises: does similar experience always lead to a coherent politic?1978 April 29, Michael Bronski, “Notes on a Necessary Gay Film”, in Gay Community News, page 11. From the entry politic
  • Two lamps mounted side by side about two feet apart will flash alternately and when this happens traffic must stop; disobedience of these signs becomes an offence.1960 September, “Talking of Trains: New level-crossing signs”, in Trains Illustrated, page 519. From the entry side by side
  • The doors have oval panels with inlay of flowers in vases, surrounded by laureling and a border of chequers filled with alternately with a rosette and a fan ornament.1925, Good Furniture Magazine of Furnishing & Decoration, Volume 25. From the entry laureling
  • The animal does not become seriously ill, but scratches itself vigorously, is either very restless or very somnolent or both alternately, hair roughened, eyes usually lachrymate and partly closed.1914 November, Chester H. Elliott, “The Antigenic Properties of Glycoproteins”, in Ludvig Hektoen, Edwin O[akes] Jordan, editors, The…. From the entry lachrymate

Meaning of alternately

  1. adverb In reciprocal succession; succeeding by turns; in alternate order.
  2. adverb By alternation; when, in a proportion, the antecedent term is compared with antecedent, and consequent.
  3. adverb Alternatively.

Full definition of alternately

Questions about alternately in a sentence

How do you use alternately in a sentence?
Alternately is used as an adverb. For example: “Driving downtown is restricted to bikes with odd and even license plate numbers alternately by day of the month.”
What is a short sentence with alternately?
“Alternately the world seems bright and opportuneless.”
What does alternately mean?
Alternately means in reciprocal succession; succeeding by turns; in alternate order.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: alternately (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use alternately in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/alternately. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.