Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use proprietary in a sentence

34 example sentences · adjective, noun

Proprietary means of or relating to property or ownership. Example: “The continuous profitability of the company is based on its many proprietary products.”

Examples of proprietary by meaning

adjectiveOwning something; having ownership.

  • the proprietary class

adjectiveCreated or manufactured exclusively by the owner or licensee of intellectual property rights, as with a patent or trade...

  • The continuous profitability of the company is based on its many proprietary products.
  • It was reported that the recipes for the secret sauce and grinder sandwiches were proprietary, known only to the current president of the corporation and the former owner of the restaurant.1996, Michael Craig Budden, Protecting Trade Secrets under the Uniform Trade Secrets Act: Practical Advice for Executives, Westport, Conn....

adjectiveNonstandard and controlled by one particular organization.

  • a proprietary extension to the HTML standard for Web page structure

adjectivePrivately owned.

  • a proprietary lake; a proprietary chapel

nounA company doing legitimate business while also serving as a front for espionage.

  • For all practical purposes, the proprietaries conduct their own financial affairs with a minimum of oversight from CIA headquarters.1975, Victor Marchetti, John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, page 159
  • The “operating proprietaries” actually do business as private firms.2013, Joseph Goulden, The Dictionary of Espionage: Spyspeak into English, page 175

More sentences with proprietary

  • Its generic name is rosuvastatin, but you may know it better by the proprietary name Crestor.From the entry generic name
  • The increasing use of proprietary technology on social-media sites shows that the FaiF Web is dead.From the entry FAIF
  • Its generic name is flying disc, but you may know it better by the proprietary name Frisbee. The generic name frisbee (lowercase) is used informally but not officially or legally.From the entry generic name
  • If a company takes data from proprietary technology, the practice may be legally problematic.2025 January 29, Cade Metz, “OpenAI Says DeepSeek May Have Improperly Harvested Its Data”, in The New York Times, →ISSN. From the entry distillation
  • The move follows developer concern that the proprietary functionality was included in Chromium to begin with.2015 June 25, Ian Paul, “'OK Google' hotword detection yanked from Chromium after user revolt”, in PCWorld. From the entry hotword
  • Most Cisalpine Celtic inscriptions are of the proprietary or funerary type.2012, Joseph Eska, “Inscriptions, Ancient”, in John T[homas] Koch, Antone Minard, editors, The Celts: History, Life, and Culture, volume 2…. From the entry cisalpine
  • A variation of freedomware, sourceware offers “open source” code with “closed (proprietary) standards”.2005, Sys Admin: The Journal for UNIX System Administrators, page 48. From the entry freedomware
  • The question was you don't have to hard cut the network over from proprietary to open.2004 August 18, “ARRIS Investor Conference Webcast - Final”, in Fair Disclosure Wire. From the entry over the top
  • Frequently, developers also consider a third kind of proprietary technology: the imaginary one.2003 May, Alex Macris, “Effective Middleware Evaluation”, in Game Developer, volume 10, number 5, San Francisco, Calif.: CMP Media, →ISSN…. From the entry dreamware
  • Deep-pocketed tech giants like Google and Microsoft already sit on mountains of proprietary information and have the resources to license more.2023 July 15, Sheera Frenkel, Stuart A. Thompson, “‘Not for Machines to Harvest’: Data Revolts Break Out Against A.I.”, in The New York…. From the entry deep-pocketed
  • Gif fics are not proprietary to the SuperWhoLock fandom.2013, Nistasha Perez, "Gif Fics and the Rebloggable Canon of SuperWhoLock", in Fan Phenomenon: Doctor Who (ed. Paul Booth), Intellect…. From the entry SuperWhoLock
  • You can actually do it in stages and this device can lay over the top of existing proprietary networks.2004 August 18, “ARRIS Investor Conference Webcast - Final”, in Fair Disclosure Wire. From the entry over the top
  • Aphrodisin: A proprietary preparation compounded of the aphrodisiac yohimbine, together with aronacein, extract of miura puama, and other ingredients.1961, Harry E. Wedeck, Dictionary of Aphrodisiacs, New York: The Citadel Press, page 28. From the entry yohimbine
  • Proprietary canned goat’s milks are on the market.1937, J[ohn] P[rice] Crozer Griffith, A[lbert] Graeme Mitchel, “Artificial Feeding in the First Year”, in The Diseases of Infants and…. From the entry goat's milk
  • The bordeauxs seem to have been the most efficient fungicides, with the proprietary lime-sulfur mixtures a close second.1909, Reports of the Board of Trustees of the University of New Hampshire, volume 4, page 388. From the entry bordeaux
  • Baumert and his coauthors pointed out that the algorithms companies use to determine these scores are often proprietary and not scientifically vetted.2023 November 29, Markham Heid, “The Truth About Sleep Trackers”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 29 Nov 2023. From the entry coauthor
  • Election placards are commonly called corflutes, but this is a proprietary brand name owned by Corex—thus the title case "c" in Corflute.2021 September 19, Conor Byrne, Liz Trevaskis, Adam Steer, “Corflutes seem to be essential to elections, but are they really a scourge?”…. From the entry corflute
  • In simple terms, open washing involves a company using the language of open education to dress up what is otherwise a traditional, proprietary practice.2020, Ke Zhang, Curtis J. Bonk, Thomas C. Reeves, Thomas H. Reynolds, MOOCs and Open Education in the Global South. From the entry open washing
  • Nonetheless, the creation of quitrenters would require fourteen years’ residence in the colony and thus posed no immediate threat to the proprietary plan.2014, Ned C. Landsman, Scotland and Its First American Colony, 1683-1765, Princeton University Press, →ISBN, page 111. From the entry quitrenter
  • With proprietary software, there is always some entity, the “owner” of the program, that controls the program—and through it, exercises power over its users.2013, Richard Stallman, “Archived copy”, in Free Software Is Even More Important Now, archived from the original on 10 Jun 2024. From the entry yoke
  • An SNMP subagent supports its own MIB, which might be an RFC-architected MIV, or might be a proprietary (referered to as enterprise-specific) MIB.2006, Lydia Parziale, Dr. Wei Liu, Carolyn Matthews, TCP/IP Tutorial and Technical Overview, page 632. From the entry subagent
  • My corporeal health is of almost as much interest to her as my spiritual health: she is especially proprietary about my bowels.2000, Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin, page 373. From the entry corporeal
  • A leading food processing firm is interested in obtaining licenses for all types of snack foods incorporating proprietary technology, such as vacuum-packed "stack chips."1974, United States. Dept. of Commerce, Commerce Today, page 36. From the entry stack chips
  • Likewise, early software pirates and "crackers" often used phrases like "information wants to be free" to protest the regulations against the copying of proprietary software packages and computer systems.2002, Steve Jones, Encyclopedia of New Media, page 1925. From the entry cracker
  • Furthermore, if software released under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) were combined with proprietary (nonfree) code, the resultant combination had to be released under the GPL.2002, Glyn Moody, Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Perseus Pub., →ISBN, page 27. From the entry nonfree
  • A long time ago, back before Al Gore invented the Internet, there were three big kids on the online block, each of which ran its own proprietary online service.2000 September 4, “AOL's 'Walled Garden'”, in Wall Street Journal. From the entry walled garden
  • Where Babcock has proprietary technologies, they will be preserved and developed, in so far as they help to give the company an edge over its rivals.1994 November 5, Ross Tieman, “Yachtsmen on a long-term voyage to recovery”, in The Times, number 65,104, London, page 25. From the entry yesteryear

Meaning of proprietary

  1. adjective Of or relating to property or ownership.
  2. adjective Owning something; having ownership.
  3. adjective Created or manufactured exclusively by the owner or licensee of intellectual property rights, as with a patent or trade secret.

Full definition of proprietary

Questions about proprietary in a sentence

How do you use proprietary in a sentence?
Proprietary is used as an adjective and noun. For example: “The continuous profitability of the company is based on its many proprietary products.”
What is a short sentence with proprietary?
“the proprietary class”
What does proprietary mean?
Proprietary means of or relating to property or ownership.

Source and license

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