Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use disrupt in a sentence

40 example sentences · verb, adjective

Disrupt means to throw into confusion or disorder. Example: “Hecklers disrupted the man's speech.”

Examples of disrupt by meaning

verbTo throw into confusion or disorder.

  • Hecklers disrupted the man's speech.

verbTo interrupt or impede.

  • Work on the tunnel was disrupted by a strike.
  • The Glaswegians bore good-humouredly the mishaps which occasionally disrupted the services during the first month.1961 February, “Talking of Trains: The Glasgow debacle”, in Trains Illustrated, page 66
  • In the Canadian and Alaskan Arctic region, where 2°C warming has already occurred since 1950, the loss of coastal sea ice and permafrost is disrupting traditional Inuit hunting routines.2017, Anthony J. McMichael, Alistair Woodward, Cameron Muir, Climate Change and the Health of Nations, →ISBN, page 51

verbTo improve a product or service in ways that displace an established one and surprise the market.

  • The internet makes it easier for leaner businesses to disrupt the larger and more unwieldy ones.

More sentences with disrupt

  • If more drivers knew how to zipper, the accident would not have disrupted traffic so much.From the entry zipper
  • Coral bleaching threatens to disrupt the population equilibria of the reef’s fishes.From the entry fishes
  • The school is specially for any child whose schooling was disrupted by illness.From the entry specially
  • After misbehaving in class, George was given a referral for disrupting class and sent to the office.From the entry referral
  • The eat-outs left by a coypu may disrupt the habitat for other organisms.From the entry eat-out
  • The president's untimely statement disrupted some very sensitive negotiations.From the entry sensitive
  • The power cable itself has enough inductance to disrupt the digital signal of the video output cable, due to poor shielding.From the entry inductance
  • By killing his great-grandfather, the time traveller disrupted the timestream.From the entry timestream
  • The download timed out because your Internet connection was disrupted.From the entry time out
  • The nondeparture of the cargo ship disrupted their schedules.From the entry nondeparture
  • To avoid disrupting rush hour traffic, the highway department declared that the bridge maintenance would be a night job.From the entry night job
  • They were for start-ups promising to reinvent medicine, disrupt education and transform the future of business.2026 June 14, Eli Saslow, Erin Schaff, “The World’s Leading Deepfake Expert No Longer Trusts His Own Eyes”, in The New York Times, →ISSN. From the entry human
  • Each day that the NIH continues to disrupt research, your ability to deliver on this duty narrows.”2025 August 7, Hannah Harris Green, “‘Impossible to rebuild’: NIH scientists say Trump cuts will imperil life-saving research”, in The…. From the entry congressionally
  • Jamestown Township isn’t the first library to have its operations disrupted in this way.2022 August 5, Claire Woodcock, “This Town Voted To Defund its Public Library After it Included LGBTQ+ Books”, in Vice.com, archived from…. From the entry LGBTQ+
  • Lines were shut and services were disrupted across Yorkshire and the East Midlands.2020 July 29, Andrew Roden, “ORR demands more action on weather resistance”, in Rail, page 21, photo caption. From the entry deluge
  • Instead I invite you to use the disruption of covid as a chance to disrupt your busyness.2020, Tony Crabbe, Busy@Home: How to thrive through the covid crisis, Piatkus, →ISBN. From the entry covid
  • Whilst such a change would throw off Tōgō's firing solution, it would also disrupt Suvorov's own.2019 September 18, Drachinifel, 20:27 from the start, in Battle of Tsushima - When the 2nd Pacific Squadron thought it couldn't get any…. From the entry firing solution
  • By tagging representations of positive fatness as fatspo, they disrupt the discourse on what bodies are aspirational.2016, Cat Pausé, Jackie Wykes, Samantha Murray, Queering Fat Embodiment, Routledge, →ISBN. From the entry -spo
  • Cells were disrupted by ribolyzation applying Lysing Matrix B tubes (MP Biomedicals).2015 August 1, “Identification of Oxygen-Responsive Transcripts in the Silage Inoculant Lactobacillus buchneri CD034 by RNA Sequencing”…. From the entry ribolyzation
  • By tagging representations of positive fatness as fatspo, they disrupt the discourse of what bodies are aspirational.2014, Cat Pausé, “Causing a Commotion: Queering Fat in Cyberspace”, in Cat Pausé, Samantha Murray, Jackie Wykes, editors, Queering Fat…. From the entry fatspo
  • "The link with the Internet disrupts the concentration that the paper book facilitates."2013, Joost Kircz et al., The Unbound Book. From the entry paper book
  • The study indicated that field intensities of radarlike pulses above some threshold can disrupt normal pacemaker function.2013, James C. Lin, Sol M. Michaelson, Biological Effects and Health Implications of Radiofrequency Radiation, Springer Science & Business…. From the entry radarlike
  • I wrote a letter to the Guild Newsletter apologizing for having disrupted the show, pleading temporary nutso.2012, Harlan Ellison, An Edge in My Voice, →ISBN. From the entry nutso
  • Given this information, my imagination was cooking up a storm of other disrupting possibilities.2009, John Cowan, Hawk Rising: Soaring on the Wings of Desire, →ISBN, page 11. From the entry cook up a storm
  • A corruption of “LOL” or “laugh out loud,” “lulz” means the joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium.2008 August 3, Mattathias Schwartz, “Malwebolence - The World of Web Trolling”, in The New York Times. From the entry lulz
  • During low points the chronicle fragmentizes as the continuity of enthusiasm becomes disrupted.2006, Josh Chetwynd, Brian Belton, British Baseball and the West Ham Club, →ISBN, page 6. From the entry fragmentize
  • Haws also alleged that Hay was engaged in a conspiracy to disrupt the parade.1986 August 16, Marcos Bisticas-Cocoves, “Harry Hay Barred from Carrying NAMBLA Sign”, in Gay Community News, volume 14, number 5, page 1. From the entry tip-off
  • Factories, mines, and other enterprises were badly disrupted as workers quit their jobs.1972, Stanley Karnow, Mao and China: Inside China's Cultural Revolution, Penguin Books, published 1984, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 268. From the entry Pingtingshan
  • Bomb threats and pickets disrupted an all-night "teach-in" tonight at Michigan State University.1965 April 9, “Pickets and Bomb Threats Disrupt Michigan Teach-In”, in The New York Times, page 65. From the entry teach-in
  • The question is whether Driscoll can gather enough support to disrupt the seemingly unstoppable march of the Starm-troopers.2024 April 20, Katy Balls, “Confessions of a defecting Starmtrooper”, in The Spectator. From the entry Starmtrooper
  • Top shelf zaza disrupted my circadian rhythm.2023, PLUMMCORP RECORDS, 03:42 from the start, in dracula flow 3. From the entry zaza
  • As the prostate enlarges with age, it squeezes the urethra that passes through it and can disrupt normal urinary function.2019 August 26, Jane E. Brody, “Alternatives to Surgery for an Enlarged Prostate”, in The New York Times. From the entry benign prostatic hyperplasia
  • Early on Nov. 11, protesters began obstructing roads and disrupting train service as part of a general strike.2019 December 24, Shibani Mahtani, Timothy McLaughlin, Tiffany Liang, Ryan Ho Kilpatrick, “In Hong Kong crackdown, police repeatedly broke…. From the entry Sai Wan Ho
  • They can open new discussions, generate new ideas and disrupt the hopeless discourse of political corruption in Ukraine.2018, Oksana Huss, “Corruption, Crisis, and Change: Use and Misuse of an Empty Signifier”, in Erica Resende, Dovilė Budrytė, Didiem…. From the entry deoligarchization
  • The disrupted pseudogene is in the mouse a pseudocopy of a gene of unknown function, called makorin 1.2017, Hani K. Rizk, Evolution Oriented Genome Personalised: The Big Bang and its Output, page 258. From the entry pseudocopy

Meaning of disrupt

  1. verb To throw into confusion or disorder.
  2. verb To interrupt or impede.
  3. verb To improve a product or service in ways that displace an established one and surprise the market.

Full definition of disrupt

Questions about disrupt in a sentence

How do you use disrupt in a sentence?
Disrupt is used as a verb and adjective. For example: “Hecklers disrupted the man's speech.”
What is a short sentence with disrupt?
“Hecklers disrupted the man's speech.”
What does disrupt mean?
Disrupt means to throw into confusion or disorder.

Source and license

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