Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use differentiate in a sentence

40 example sentences · verb, noun

Differentiate means to modify so as to create a difference or distinction. Example: “What differentiates an alligator from a crocodile?”

Examples of differentiate by meaning

verbTo show or be the difference or distinction between things.

  • What differentiates an alligator from a crocodile?
  • Taste differentiates a gentleman—for instance, Mr.1998, W. Ross Winterowd, The English Department: A Personal and Institutional History, Southern Illinois University Press, →ISBN, page 66

verbTo recognize as different or distinct.

  • How do you differentiate a fake smile from a genuine one?
  • The mass of the rich and poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.1933 January 9, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter XXII, in Down and Out in Paris and London, London: Victor Gollancz...

verbTo perceive the difference between things; to discriminate.

  • he refused to instruct that actual intent to harm or recklessness had to be found before punitive damages could be awarded, or that a verdict for respondent should differentiate between compensatory and punitive damages.1964, New York Times v. Sullivan

verbTo teach a lesson in multiple different ways in order to meet the needs of more or less advanced students.

  • Like most teaching, differentiating is a mix of art and science.2012 May 16, Michael Alison Chandler, “Teaching for all levels — in one class”, in The Washington Post, archived from the original on 11...
  • Moreover, children of STIP-teachers who showed many types of differentiation activities learnt more than children of STIP-teachers who differentiated less.2017 August, Tessa H.S. Eysink, Manon Hulsbeek, Hannie Gijlers, “Supporting primary school teachers in differentiating in the regular...
  • I use technology to differentiate in my Algebra classroom in many different ways.2018 June 22, Larry Ferlazzo, quoting Sarah Shartzer, “Response: Ways to Use Tech to Differentiate Instruction”, in Education Week...

verbTo (cause to) go through a process of development called differentiation; to make or become different in form or...

  • In Chapter IV we learned that every animal consists of a body, or soma, formed of cells that are differentiated from the germ cells usually at an early stage of development.1930, Robert Evans Snodgrass, Insects: Their Ways and Means of Living
  • Osteoblasts are derived from stromal cells, a type of connective tissue cell in the bone marrow, whereas osteoclasts differentiate from macrophages, which are tissue-bound derivatives of monocytes, a type of white blood cell (see p. 402).2013, Lauralee Sherwood, “The Peripheral Endocrine Glands”, in Human Physiology: From Cells to Systems, 8th edition, Belmont, CA...

nounSomething that has been differentiated or stratified.

  • There is no discernable tendency, however, for the differentiates to fall into two extremities, as would be expected if they were trending toward distinct eutectics in a residua system.1969, Alexander R. McBirney, Geology and Petrology of the Galápagos Islands, page 185
  • Bogatikov et al. (1985), who believe that any magma typically exhibits both agpaitic and miascitic differentiates.1991, Roger H. Mitchell, Petrology of Lamproites, page 10

More sentences with differentiate

  • To calculate acceleration, you need to differentiate velocity with respect to time.From the entry with respect to
  • Nearly all documentation of business processes should be skimmable, with the summaries clearly differentiated from the detailed expositions.From the entry skimmable
  • “Unprovenienced” is to be differentiated from “unprovenanced,” which refers to artifacts whose ownership history is unknown.2024 April 3, Christopher J. Foster, Glenda Chao, and Mercedes Valmisa, “The Methods and Ethics of Researching Unprovenienced Artifacts…. From the entry unprovenanced
  • Neural crest cells are first developed into chromoblasts and then differentiated into chromophores.2021 February 20, Bo-Tian Yang, Bin Wen, Yu Ji, et al., “Comparative metabolomics analysis of pigmentary and structural coloration in…. From the entry chromoblast
  • In this communicational mode, language units can be differentiated as usualisms and contextualisms (Fig. 4-6).2020, Alexander Barkovich, Informational Linguistics: The New Communicational Reality, page 125. From the entry contextualism
  • And what differentiates a melee from a shemozzle and a free-for-all?2018 February 8, Ian O'Riordan, “GAA Congress to separate a melee and a shemozzle”, in The Irish Times. From the entry shemozzle
  • Recent publications even state that they can differentiate into nonmesodermal cells such as hepatocytes, neurons, or astrocytes.2015 August 2, J.-F. Stoltz et al., “Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine: Myth or Reality of the 21th^([sic]) Century”, in Stem Cells…. From the entry nonmesodermal
  • Proto-Czech can be differentiated from Proto-Polish and Proto-Slovak from the end of the 10th century.2014, Sebastian Kempgen, “Abstract”, in Die slavischen Sprachen / The Slavic Languages, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, →ISBN, page 1384. From the entry Proto-Czech
  • This makes it easier for you to quickly differentiate between active code and comments.2012, Chris Grover, “Triggering Actions”, in Adobe Edge Preview 5: The Missing Manual, 3rd edition, Sebastopol: O'Reilly Media, →ISBN…. From the entry active
  • Products are increasingly differentiated by the one-two punch of crowd-sourced review and easy factual comparison.2012 March 21, Dwight Crow, “'Everything Is Automated': How Web Start-Ups Attack the Offline Economy”, in The Atlantic, archived from the…. From the entry one-two punch
  • As with other sayings, one has to differentiate between myth and reality.2012, Daniela Kramer-Moore, Michael Moore, “It’s not the same thing”, in Destructive Myths in Family Therapy: How to Overcome Barriers to…. From the entry sometimes a cigar is a cigar
  • FreeBSD differentiates between a base DNS install and a normal (nonbase) DNS install.2011, Ron Aitchison, Pro DNS and BIND 10, page 103. From the entry nonbase
  • Allotypes were originally defined by antisera that differentiated allelic variants of immunoglobulin (Ig) subclasses.2009, Julius M. Cruse, Robert E. Lewis, Illustrated Dictionary of Immunology, 3rd edition, Taylor & Francis (CRC Press), page 32. From the entry allotype
  • Signs are inherent in the various aspects of the immune system which differentiate self from non-self.2009, Bill Whitehouse, Meditations of a Sufi. From the entry non-self
  • The cells of the primitive embryoblast differentiate into two layers, the epiblast and the hypoblast.2006, Cynthia S. Cook, Kathleen K. Sulik, Kenneth W. Wright, “1: Embryology”, in Kenneth W. Wright, Peter H. Spiegel, Lisa Thompson…. From the entry epiblast
  • Fondutas are silky cheese concoctions differentiated from fondues because they're thickened with egg yolks.2006, Ellen Brown, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Fondues And Hot Dips. From the entry fonduta
  • How do you differentiate between a 'prebonsai' and regular nursery stock?2001 January 14, RickB...@aol.com, “Value of a pre-bonsai (was Re: pre-bonsais?)”, in rec.arts.bonsai (Usenet). From the entry prebonsai
  • Much of the Permian Capitan reef was strongly differentiated into open surface and cryptic communities.1999, Rachel Wood, Reef Evolution, page 95. From the entry cryptic
  • It was only able to differentiate proteins from nonproteins and spores from nonspores.1998, National Research Council, […], Review of Mass Spectrometry and Bioremediation Programs of the Edgewood Research, Development and…. From the entry nonspore
  • Idiopathic IBD also must be differentiated from infectious, ischemic, and radiation enterocolitides.1996 July, Richard M. Gore, Emil J. Balthazar, Gary G. Ghahremani, Frank H. Miller, “CT Features of Ulcerative Colitis and Crohn’s…. From the entry enterocolitis
  • There are some old Balticisms though they are difficult to differentiate from Lithuanian.1996, Zigmas Zinkevičius, The History of the Lithuanian Language, page 52. From the entry Balticism
  • Many panelists find it difficult to differentiate between rancidity and WOF.1991, Henk Maarse, Volatile Compounds in Foods and Beverages, →ISBN, page 702. From the entry WOF
  • Both macandrous and nannandrous species produce stephanokont sperm in specially differentiated segments of the filament called antheridia.1984, Hayden N. Pritchard, Patricia T. Bradt, Biology of nonvascular plants, page 91. From the entry stephanokont
  • In English there is no grammatical device to differentiate predicational judgments from nonpredicational descriptions.1965 June 4, Shigeyuki Kuroda, “Generative grammatical studies in the Japanese language”, in DSpace@MIT, retrieved 24 Feb 2014, page 38. From the entry particle
  • The pseudonegative reaction must be carefully differentiated from the positive reaction.1924, George Rudolph Herrmann, Methods in Medicine. From the entry pseudonegative
  • Energy is apparently transmuted by a series of octavations and that these octavations differentiate matter.1923, Medical Review of Reviews, XXIX, page 22. From the entry octavation
  • It is only good for smaller quakes, and is not very good at differentiating the sizes of bigger shocks,” said McGuire.2025 March 28, Nicola Davis, quoting Bill McGuire, “What caused Myanmar and Thailand earthquake and how big was it?”, in The Guardian, →ISSN. From the entry Richter scale
  • The backward() function uses PyTorch's automatic differentiation package, torch.autograd, to differentiate and compute gradients of tensors based on the chain rule.2021, Joe Papa, PyTorch Pocket Reference, page 48. From the entry chain rule

Meaning of differentiate

  1. verb To modify so as to create a difference or distinction.
  2. verb To show or be the difference or distinction between things.
  3. verb To recognize as different or distinct.

Full definition of differentiate

Questions about differentiate in a sentence

How do you use differentiate in a sentence?
Differentiate is used as a verb and noun. For example: “What differentiates an alligator from a crocodile?”
What is a short sentence with differentiate?
“Taste differentiates a gentleman—for instance, Mr.”
What does differentiate mean?
Differentiate means to modify so as to create a difference or distinction.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: differentiate (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 differentiate in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/differentiate. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.