Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use underlying in a sentence

40 example sentences · adjective, noun

Underlying means lying underneath. Example: “We dug down to the underlying rock.”

Examples of underlying by meaning

adjectiveLying underneath.

  • We dug down to the underlying rock.
  • During the track renewals, advantage was taken to redrain the area and the old spent ballast was removed down to the underlying rock, new ballast and drains being provided throughout.1950 January, “Re-Signalling at Liverpool Lime Street Station”, in Railway Magazine, page 43
  • Sometimes, the underlying layers are exposed by erosion, revealing the story of the rocks like an open book.2012, Chinle Miller, In Mesozoic Lands: The Mesozoic Geology of Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, Kindle edition

adjectiveBasic or fundamental.

  • Points and straight lines are underlying elements of geometry.
  • Finding a successful treatment for Alzheimer’s faces two major hurdles: the first being we still don’t know enough about the disease’s underlying biology.2018 January 18, Jürgen Götz, “Why it’s so hard to treat dementia”, in CNN
  • The underlying problem with transport policy is that there no coherent strategy.2020 December 2, Christian Wolmar, “Wales offers us a glimpse of an integrated transport policy”, in Rail, page 56

adjectiveImplicit.

  • Many nursery rhymes have an underlying meaning.

More sentences with underlying

  • Any rule of thumb, however true (it is), is useless unless you understand its underlying logic.From the entry however
  • The socket communications layer is agnostic with regard to its underlying transport mechanism—it is “transport-agnostic”.From the entry agnostic
  • Marked weakness unresponsive to dietary change and exercise may indicate an underlying neurologic or metabolic problem.From the entry indicate
  • Any efforts to reduce overimaging must find ways of addressing the underlying incentives behind defensive medicine.From the entry overimaging
  • Drill deeper and you may find the underlying assumptions faulty.From the entry drill
  • Racism often connotes an underlying fear or ignorance.From the entry connote
  • The ETF is trading cheap to NAV right now; we can arb this by buying the ETF and selling the underlying constituents.From the entry cheap
  • The ETF is trading rich to NAV right now; we can arb this by selling the ETF and buying the underlying constituents.From the entry rich
  • Underlying every Esperanto enthusiast is the Esperantist ideal that the world would be a better place if everyone could understand each other better.From the entry Esperantist
  • The Zariski topology allows tools from topology to be used in the study of algebraic varieties, even when the underlying field is not a topological field.From the entry Zariski topology
  • “I believe deep inside everyone's heart is an underlying loneliness,” he says.2025 October 14, Catherine Thorbecke, “China’s AI Dragons Must Survive ‘Involution’ to Conquer the World”, in Bloomberg, Bloomberg L.P.. From the entry view
  • Ford said the underlying enabler would be digital ticketing, claiming that passengers will want touch-free travel.2021 March 10, “Network News: Understanding passengers' needs is key to recovery”, in RAIL, number 926, page 15. From the entry touch-free
  • Puma worked with TruCost and PWC to carry out the underlying analysis.2019, Satyajit Bose, Guo Dong, Anne Simpson, The Financial Ecosystem: The Role of Finance in Achieving Sustainability, Springer Nature…. From the entry EP&L
  • Democratic codes are the underlying discursive structure of democratic readings and evaluations of the world.2018, Mikkel Thorup, “Democratic Hatreds: The Making of ‘the Hating Enemy’ in Liberal Democracy”, in Thomas Brudholm, Birgitte Schepelern…. From the entry othering
  • Therefore, we conclude that the underlying pathophysiological mechanism of ASD constitutes a “connectopathy.”2017, Takao Yamasaki, Toshihiko Maekawa, Takako Fujita, & Shozo Tobimatsu, "Connectopathy in Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Review of…. From the entry connectopathy
  • The soft and bony tissues underlying the borders were markedly damaged by presumed explosive injuries.2016 March, Amanda M McLemore et al., “Suicide by Bomb, with Decapitation”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name). From the entry rare
  • Polyploidy and hybridisation are important evolutionary forces shaping plant genomes and underlying the huge angiosperm diversity.2015 July 8, Nayyereh Olanj et al., “The striking and unexpected cytogenetic diversity of genus Tanacetum L. (Asteraceae): a cytometric…. From the entry hybridisation
  • The underlying pathological aberrations comprise insulin resistance and bihormonal dysfunction of the pancreatic α- and β-cells.2015 April 10, Xiaoping Chen, Wenying Yang, “Branched-chain amino acids and the association with type 2 diabetes”, in Journal of Diabetes…. From the entry bihormonal
  • After metamorphosis, neither the neurotroch nor the aTUB-LIR underlying the neurotroch is visible.2015 July 11, Néva P Meyer et al., “Nervous system development in lecithotrophic larval and juvenile stages of the annelid Capitella…. From the entry neurotroch
  • The neurites underlying the prototroch are lost after metamorphosis, suggesting that these neurons serve a larval function.2015 July 11, Néva P Meyer et al., “Nervous system development in lecithotrophic larval and juvenile stages of the annelid Capitella…. From the entry prototroch
  • Among the transformation steps, the mechanisms underlying metacyclogenesis have been extensively studied.2015 August 13, “A Novel Method for Inducing Amastigote-To-Trypomastigote Transformation In Vitro in Trypanosoma cruzi Reveals the…. From the entry metacyclogenesis
  • The classification of the underlying lung disease was based on multidisciplinary assessments by pneumologists, pathologists and radiologists.2015 December 3, “Pulmonary Hypertension in Patients with Chronic Fibrosing Idiopathic Interstitial Pneumonias”, in PLOS ONE, →DOI. From the entry pneumologist
  • Nonetheless, the underlying pathology manifests beyond motoneuron degeneration, affecting also widespread extramotor areas.2015 November 12, “Eye Movement Deficits Are Consistent with a Staging Model of pTDP-43 Pathology in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis”, in…. From the entry extramotor
  • We improve the previous method by exploiting sparsity, which naturally arises in the underlying codelists..2015, Moritz Schulze Darup, Martin Mönnigmann, “Improved automatic computation of Hessian matrix spectral bounds”, in arXiv. From the entry codelists
  • It is an accumulator of the underlying stock with a contract period of 12 months.2014, Jerome Yen, Kin Keung Lai, Emerging Financial Derivatives, Routledge, →ISBN. From the entry accumulator
  • A skew demonstrates the relationship between the movement of an underlying asset and its volatility.2013, Larry Shover, “Volatility Skew: Smile or Smirk?”, in Trading Options in Turbulent Markets: Master Uncertainty through Active…. From the entry skew
  • The Monument upwarp basically defines the underlying structure of the entire area, giving it its unique topography.2012, Chinle Miller, Roger Miller, “The Colorado Plateau”, in In Mesozoic Lands:The Mesozoic Geology of Arches and Canyonlands National…. From the entry upwarp
  • The second point we want to map out concerns the underlying mediological assumptions of both perspectives.2012, Daniel Šuber, Slobodan Karamanic, (Please provide the book title or journal name), →ISBN, page 16. From the entry mediological
  • The hypervisor is the component that translates the virtual machines into the underlying hardware.2011, Edward Whalen, Oracle VM Implementation and Administration Guide, McGraw Hill Professional, →ISBN, page 17. From the entry hypervisor
  • What, beyond abnormal, dysregulated cell division, was the common pathophysiological mechanism underlying cancer?2010, Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies, Fourth Estate (2011), page 285. From the entry pathophysiological
  • The polychoric correlation coefficient is an estimator of the correlation coefficient in the underlying bivariate normal distribution.2010, William H. Greene, David A. Hensher, Modeling Ordered Choices: A Primer, page 294. From the entry polychoric
  • The bruise on my cheek had ripened into an underlying violet with an alienish green tinge.2007, Nancy Bush, Electric Blue, page 212. From the entry alienish
  • Rather, they said that perceptual fields are always caused by underlying patterns of brain activity.2004, B. Hergenhahn, An Introduction to the History of Psychology, page 426. From the entry gestaltist

Meaning of underlying

  1. adjective Lying underneath.
  2. adjective Basic or fundamental.
  3. adjective Implicit.

Full definition of underlying

Questions about underlying in a sentence

How do you use underlying in a sentence?
Underlying is used as an adjective and noun. For example: “We dug down to the underlying rock.”
What is a short sentence with underlying?
“Many nursery rhymes have an underlying meaning.”
What does underlying mean?
Underlying means lying underneath.

Source and license

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