Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use propagate in a sentence

40 example sentences · verb, adjective

Propagate means to cause to continue or multiply by generation, or successive production. Example: “It takes 24 hours for password changes to propagate throughout the system.”

Examples of propagate by meaning

verbTo cause to spread to extend; to impel or continue forward in space.

  • to propagate sound or light

verbTo spread from person to person; to extend the knowledge of; to originate and spread; to carry from place to place; to...

  • The works of the freethinker Averroes (twelfth century) which were based on Aristotle's philosophy, propagated a small wave of rationalism in Christian countries.1913, J. B. Bury, chapter 3, in A History of Freedom of Thought
  • The DPRK propagated an extraordinary tale of his birth occurring on Mount Baekdu, one of Korea's most revered sites, being accompanied by shooting stars in the sky.2011 December 19, Kerry Brown, “Kim Jong-il obituary”, in The Guardian

verbTo take effect on all relevant devices in a network.

  • It takes 24 hours for password changes to propagate throughout the system.

verbTo cause to take effect on all relevant devices in a network.

  • The server propagates the password file at midnight each day.

More sentences with propagate

  • In genetic hitchhiking, a gene is propagated because it occurs in conjunction with a favourable mutation.From the entry hitchhike
  • The flag irises are for the most part of the easiest culture and easily propagated.From the entry irises
  • Earth Day is a way of propagating and celebrating the environmentalist mindset.From the entry mindset
  • This paper extends lazy basic block versioning to propagate type information interprocedurally, across function call boundaries.2015, Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert, Marc Feeley, “Interprocedural Type Specialization of JavaScript Programs Without Type Analysis”, in arXiv. From the entry interprocedurally
  • Similar methods were later reused to propagate other movies belonging to the psycho-biddy genre.2014, Justyna Stępień, Redefining Kitsch and Camp in Literature and Culture, →ISBN, page 48. From the entry psycho-biddy
  • Computer virusses are programs which can self-replicate and propagate via digital media.2014, Kenneth A. Spencer, All About Your Computer: An Explanation of the Computer for the Interested User, →ISBN, page 210. From the entry virusses
  • Shock waves are sudden discontinuities propagated in compressible media – usually air.2012, George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral, Penguin, published 2013, page 57. From the entry discontinuity
  • The message, however, propagated through the photo and bulldozer reference is: Israel is "Holocausting" the Palestinians.2009 October 29, J. David, “The Propaganda Campaign of Lies against Israel that began in the Fall of 2000”, in The Jews, Nationalism, and…. From the entry holocaust
  • He and his associates started traveling all over Sindh to propagate the cause of Sindhudesh.2007, B. Raman, The Kaoboys of R&AW: Down Memory Lane. From the entry Sindhudesh
  • Many molecular recombination models propose such recombinator regions from which hybrid DNA is propagated.1981, Jeffrey N. Strathern, Elizabeth W. Jones, James R. Broach, The Molecular Biology of the Yeast Saccharomyces, Life Cycle and…. From the entry recombinator
  • The more important difference was social media, which propagates and even transforms terms more rapidly than broadcasting and print.2025 February 20, John McWhorter, “How ‘Woke’ Became the ‘Woke Right’ (and Why It Shouldn’t Surprise Anyone)”, in New York Times. From the entry hermetically
  • Rather than propagating conspiracies about the evils of wealthy Jewry, they beat up poor Roma in back alleys.2008, Edward Snajdr, Nature Protests: The End of Ecology in Slovakia, University of Washington Press, →ISBN, page 176. From the entry conspiracy
  • These are ‘push-pull’ waves analogous to sound waves, in which each particle moves back and forth as the waves propagate.2004, Richard Fortey, The Earth, Folio Society, published 2011, page 71. From the entry P-wave
  • Electrical energy, which propagates in a conductive medium along definite paths, may also be considered to be entropyless.1998, Oktavian Stanislavovich Ksenzhek, Alexander George Volkov, Plant energetics. From the entry entropyless
  • Ecomania becomes a vehicle for propagating feminist ideology to a wider audience than would otherwise be receptive to it.1998, John P. Newport, The New Age Movement and the Biblical Worldview. From the entry ecomania
  • The diadochi not only continued to propagate the typological portrait of Alexander, they also commissioned such portraits themselves.1982, Bernard Frischer, The Sculpted Word: Epicureanism and Philosophical Recruitment in Ancient Greece, University of California Press…. From the entry diadochi
  • The Somas who were pushed out of Kosala and who were ardent Saivites did not find much difficulty in propagating Saivism.1964, Nabin Kumar Sahu, Utkal University History Of Orissa, volume 1, The Utkal University, page 7. From the entry Kosala
  • We agreed there was a pressing need for a systematic investigation of sisu, how Finns think about it, how it is propagated.2016, Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, →ISBN. From the entry sisu
  • On the classical field theory level, they are described by an action functional extremalising the volume of a manifold swept by a propagating membrane.2015, Jan Vysoky, “Geometry of Membrane Sigma Models”, in arXiv. From the entry extremalising
  • Of course our teachers in this lifetime have all been mainly from the darkside so it has been easy to propagate these lies.2011, Peter R. Farley, “As Above, So Below”, in Where Were You before the Tree of Life?: The True History of the Darkness and the Light…. From the entry darkside
  • The steel in the Minot tank cars exhibited relatively low fracture toughness, and cracks propagated rapidly around the circumference of each tank.2005 November 29, National Transportation Safety Board, “Tank Car Crashworthiness”, in Collision of Norfolk Southern Freight Train 192…. From the entry normalize
  • A nonaffixed IUP measuring unit has a certain risk that it could be expelled by propagated uterine contractions during the early postpartum period.2005, American Journal of Veterinary Research, page 1612. From the entry nonaffixed
  • Euphorbias can be left alone for decades, but you can dig and divide cushion spurge as often as every 3 years to propagate it.2002, Reader's Digest Association, Care Free Plants: A Guide to Growing the 200 Hardiest, Low-maintenance, Long-living Beauties, Readers…. From the entry cushion spurge
  • “Beyond ants, this shows for the first time the evolution of xenoparity, which is the need to propagate another species’ genome by means of its own eggs,” Romiguier said.2025 September 16, Ashley Strickland, “Ant queen gives birth to two different species”, in AccuWeather, archived from the original on 24…. From the entry xenoparity
  • But the Pahlavist idea of globalization differed from that propagated by the capitalist West under the slogan of liberal cosmopolitanism, and from the Soviet one, coined international proletarianism.2019, Zhand Shakibi, Pahlavi Iran and the Politics of Occidentalism, page 150. From the entry Pahlavist
  • A fire on a flat surface cannot propagate because much of the heat generated is lost to the air and feedback is too weak to pyrolize volatile gases.2017, Robert W. Fitzgerald, Fire Performance Analysis for Buildings, page 104. From the entry pyrolize
  • Unlike seed plants, ferns propagate through haploid spores (Figure 1 a), thus requiring germination and growth of the gametophyte phase in sterile tissue culture to obtain sporophytes for callogenesis.2015 July 3, Andrew R G Plackett, Ester H Rabbinowitsch, Jane A Langdale, “Protocol: genetic transformation of the fern Ceratopteris…. From the entry callogenesis
  • That is to say , books on science and mathematics would naturally be propagated accretively, with the addition of numerous anonymous updates, though no one maintained a revision history.2007, C. K. Raju, Cultural Foundations of Mathematics, page 45. From the entry accretively
  • An experiment was carried out to investigate whether detached segments of floricanes during winter pruning of erect blackberries could be used as a source of propagating material.1997 July, HortScience, volume 32, number 4, →DOI. From the entry floricane
  • In general, they are propagating the image of Ukrainians as the European descendants of good peasant stock, of multiethnic pioneers, and of an ancient multiethnic state.1993, Alexander J. Motyl, Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine After Totalitarianism. From the entry multiethnic
  • This judicious representation of brutality, domestic violence and struggle empowers women trying to break the shame and fear propagated by the antiseptic whitewashing of conventional media.1991 May 4, Mary Dowd, “Risky Business”, in Gay Community News, page 7. From the entry antiseptic
  • If our students do not learn these things from us they will continue undisabused in the misconceptions widely believed and propagated in the Australian society at large.1977 J. F. Hausfeld & M. W. Jackson "On 'political education'" Australian journal of political science (Vol.13 No.1…. From the entry undisabused
  • The revolutionary committees of Hungshan District and (Tunghsihu) farm both held "broadcast mobilisation rallies" to propagate the fine record of Li to the poor and lower-middle peasants.1970 July 15 [1970 July 13], “Wuhan Opens Campaign to Learn from Local Hero Li”, in Daily Report: Communist China, volume I, number 136…. From the entry Tunghsihu
  • First thing we need to do is stop this nonsense mentality of “defund the police” and “cops are minority killers.” It was propagated by social-justice warriors and extreme left politicians.2023 May 20, W. Nelson Craft, “There can be no pacifists on the St. Louis crime battlefield”, in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, volume 145…. From the entry social-justice warrior
  • However, it was suggested that potentially losing genotypes (defined as such in bi-chimeras scenario) might survive in multichimera entities as stem cells in refugia and successfully propagate to succeeding generations.2009, Baruch Rinkevich, Valeria Matranga, Stem Cells in Marine Organisms, →ISBN, page 12. From the entry multichimera

Meaning of propagate

  1. verb To cause to continue or multiply by generation, or successive production.
  2. verb To cause to spread to extend; to impel or continue forward in space.
  3. verb To spread from person to person; to extend the knowledge of; to originate and spread; to carry from place to place; to disseminate.

Full definition of propagate

Questions about propagate in a sentence

How do you use propagate in a sentence?
Propagate is used as a verb and adjective. For example: “It takes 24 hours for password changes to propagate throughout the system.”
What is a short sentence with propagate?
“to propagate sound or light”
What does propagate mean?
Propagate means to cause to continue or multiply by generation, or successive production.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: propagate (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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