Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use marginal in a sentence

40 example sentences · adjective, noun

Marginal means of, relating to, or located at or near a margin or edge; also figurative usages of location and margin (edge). Example: “The marginal area at the edge of the salt-marsh has its own plants.”

Examples of marginal by meaning

adjectiveOf, relating to, or located at or near a margin or edge; also figurative usages of location and margin (edge).

  • The marginal area at the edge of the salt-marsh has its own plants.
  • In recent years there has been an increase in violence against marginal groups.

adjectiveWritten in the margin of a book.

  • There were more marginal notes than text.
  • The early pages had marginal notes most of which were lost when rats nibbled away the manuscript edges.1999, R. I. Page, Introduction to English Runes, Boydell Press, page 198

adjectiveSharing a border; geographically adjacent.

  • Monmouthshire is a Welsh county marginal to England.

adjectiveOf a value, or having a characteristic that is of a value, that is close to being unacceptable or leading to exclusion...

  • His writing ability was marginal at best.
  • Having reviewed the test, there are two students below the required standard and three more who are marginal.
  • The pilots lacked experience flying in marginal weather conditions.

adjectiveBarely productive.

  • He farmed his marginal land with difficulty.

adjectiveSubject to a change in sitting member with only a small change in voting behaviour, this usually being inferred from...

  • In Bristol West, Labour had a majority of only 1,000, so the seat is considered highly marginal this time around.
  • In ‘battleground’ seats with the Conservatives, Liberal Democrat vote shares increased most in the most marginal seats.2002, Andrew Geddes, Jonathan Tonge, Labour′s Second Landslide: The British General Election 2001, page 79
  • In Outer London, Harrow East is now a more marginal Labour hold than Harrow West.2007, Robert Waller, Byron Criddle, The Almanac of British Politics, page 58

nounSomething or somebody that is marginal.

  • I have watched and waited for a saint but none showed up—not even a marginal saint.2013 August 29, Clifford D. Simak, Project Pope, Hachette UK, →ISBN, →OCLC

More sentences with marginal

  • Monopolies engaging in profit maximization will produce at the quantity where its marginal revenue equals marginal cost.From the entry maximization
  • In India, the percentage of marginal farmers among all farmers is nearly 70%.From the entry marginal farmer
  • Nevertheless, First looks set to become a big fish in this marginal pond.2024 December 27, Philip Haigh, “FirstGroup advances its plans for open access expansion”, in RAIL, number 1025, page 49. From the entry big fish
  • Mainliners view sociology as a profession or occupation, and marginals are antisociologists and unsociologists.2017, Shulamit Reinharz, On Becoming a Social Scientist. From the entry mainliner
  • The quality of roads, railroads and air transport is still low but with marginal improvements.2014, Dragan Ðuricin, Iva Vuksanovic, “Determinants of National (Un)Competitiveness: Lessons for Policy Makers in Serbia”, in An…. From the entry wambliness
  • Their cost price is also the measure of the marginal vendibility of the commodity.2013, Frank W. Taussig, Principles of Economics, volume I. From the entry vendibility
  • Marginal cost and marginal vendibility thus coincide; and when they coincide, there is equilibrium.2013, Frank W. Taussig, Principles of Economics, volume I. From the entry vendibility
  • Thus one can create multivariate distributions by mixing and matching copulas and marginal distributions.2011, Julian Shaw, “Chapter 16: Julian Shaw”, in Richard R. Lindsey, Barry Schachter, editors, How I Became a Quant: Insights from 25 of…. From the entry copula
  • She is marginal even in relation to the marginal: the little-known avant-garde writer’s even lesser-known wife.2011, Ruth Hemus, “The Manifesto of Céline Arnauld”, in Elza Adamowicz, Eric Robertson, editors, Dada and Beyond, Volume 1: Dada…. From the entry little-known
  • A new complexification occurs when the situation becomes desperate through crashing marginal returns on increasing complicatedness.2002, Charles J. Kibert, Jan Sendzimir, and G. Bradley Guy (editors), Timothy F.H. Allen, Construction Ecology, Nature as the basis for…. From the entry complexification
  • Rails alone can only ever have a marginal effect on a board's general turning ability.c. 2000, Nick Carroll, surfline.com http://www.surfline.com/community/whoknows/10_21_rails.cfm. From the entry rail
  • The marginal rent-seeker may in fact have faced high information costs.1993 Jan, Thomas W. Hazlett, Robert J. Michaels, “The Cost of Rent-Seeking: Evidence from Cellular Telephone License Lotteries”, in…. From the entry rent-seeker
  • If you don't speak English or are marginal in some other way, it's worse.1990 February 4, Margy Dowzer, Mary Frances Platt, Aviva Shmuckler, “Disability And Accessibility Cost Money!”, in Gay Community News…. From the entry cheat
  • As also proved from statistical figures, different wind conditions are established over some marginal parts of China.1988, Manfred Domrös, Peng Gongbing, “Circulation”, in The Climate of China, Springer-Verlag, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 36. From the entry Ürümqi
  • My father is the product of a marginal small-town South Texas family.1984 February 4, David Morris, “Different Origins: Joto Güero del West Side”, in Gay Community News, volume 11, number 28, page 15. From the entry scrub brush
  • Extant scholarship and theory tends to overlook and mis-theorize the role that marginal actors play in organizational change and development.2017, Seth A. Jacobson, Marginal Matters. From the entry mis-theorize
  • This determines when the marginal farmer chooses legal GM seed rather than illegal GM seed or conventional seed.2015, Anne Jillian Arnold, A game-theoretic approach to modelling crop royalties. (thesis), University of Adelaide, page 62. From the entry marginal farmer
  • Nevertheless, these denticles are clearly not the marginal prolongation of the enamel ridges as would be expected in a pseudoziphodont tooth.2015, Attila Ősi et al., “An enigmatic crocodyliform tooth from the bauxites of western Hungary suggests hidden mesoeucrocodylian…. From the entry pseudoziphodont
  • It also includes ecoservice grass clippings from marginal land where the biodiversity is threatened by an excess level of nutrients.2013, L. Lange, Biomass combustion science, technology and engineering. From the entry ecoservice
  • As I noted earlier, the candelabra tree motif is one of the characteristic marginal decorations in Iberian Hebrew Bibles.2013, Dalia-Ruth Halperin, Illuminating in Micrography: The Catalan Micrography, page 83. From the entry candelabra tree
  • Similarly, testing groups that are already socially marginal can further exacerbate syphilophobia as well as the existing prejudices against these groups.1995, Suzanne Poirier, Chicago's War on Syphilis, 1937-40, →ISBN. From the entry syphilophobia
  • DIAGNOSIS—Rostrum usually with marginal spines, tubercles, or angles at base of acumen, and rarely with low medina carina.1981, Horton Holcombe Hobbs, The Crayfishes of Georgia: Issue 318 of Smithsonian contributions to zoology, Smithsonian Institution, page 486. From the entry acumen
  • The glomerous vascular arrangement may render adjacent tissue ischemic by permitting by-pass of an already marginal blood supply.1978, A. Chandrahasan Johnson et al., “Relation of vascular and osseous changes in leprosy”, in Skeletal Radiology, volume 3, pages 36–41. From the entry glomerous
  • Below the EWSB scale, the leading coupling of the familon to fermions becomes marginal after replacing the Higgs in (4.13) with its vacuum expectation value.2019, Benjamin Wallisch, Cosmological Probes of Light Relics (Springer Theses), Springer Nature, page 90. From the entry familon
  • The archicontinent marginal sedimentary transits to carbonate platform sedimentary from south to north, and the restricted platform and supratidal dolomitic flat develop.2015, Lin Yu-xiang, “Lithofacies Paleogeography Characteristics of Early Ordovician in the Eastern Part of North China Platform”, in…. From the entry archicontinent
  • President, I know you’re interested in tax reform because when you were an actor, the marginal tax rate was 90 percent — and Mr.2009 August 30, Bill Bradley, “Tax Reform’s Lesson for Health Care Reform”, in New York Times. From the entry depreciable
  • For the most part, however, the groom was physically absent or existed as a marginal figure within the pages of bridal magazines.2006, Vicki Howard, “Bridal Magazines”, in Brides, Inc.: American Weddings and the Business of Tradition, Philadelphia, Pa.: University of…. From the entry groomal

Meaning of marginal

  1. adjective Of, relating to, or located at or near a margin or edge; also figurative usages of location and margin (edge).
  2. adjective Written in the margin of a book.
  3. adjective Sharing a border; geographically adjacent.

Full definition of marginal

Questions about marginal in a sentence

How do you use marginal in a sentence?
Marginal is used as an adjective and noun. For example: “The marginal area at the edge of the salt-marsh has its own plants.”
What is a short sentence with marginal?
“He farmed his marginal land with difficulty.”
What does marginal mean?
Marginal means of, relating to, or located at or near a margin or edge; also figurative usages of location and margin (edge).

Source and license

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