Sample sentences for IRREDUCIBLE

(click/touch triangles for details)

Definition

not reducible; i.e., incapable of being made smaller or simpler

Waste is down to an irreducible minimum.

irreducible = not capable of being made smaller

a seemingly irreducible gulf between their viewpoints
The model is complex, but irreducible if it is to remain predictive.
an irreducible hernia
He had a knack for breaking things down into quiet, irreducible truths.
James Bradley -- Flags of Our Fathers
They hold their desires as an irreducible primary, as a fact superseding all facts.
Ayn Rand -- Atlas Shrugged
Thus by his failure to find any contradictions he proves that the fifth postulate is irreducible to simpler axioms.
Robert M. Pirsig -- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Something irreducibly human, or male, threatened the order of their household, and Briony knew that unless she helped her sister, they would all suffer.
Ian McEwan -- Atonement
Perhaps it was owing to his own ignorance of music that he had been able to receive so confused an impression, one of those that are, notwithstanding, our only purely musical impressions, limited in their extent, entirely original, and irreducible into any other kind.
Marcel Proust -- Swann's Way
Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous.
George Orwell -- Politics and the English Language
The result was apt to be an irreducible combination of persons having no other quality in common than their abstinence from bridge, and the antagonisms developed in a group lacking the one taste which might have amalgamated them, were in this case aggravated by bad weather, and by the ill-concealed boredom of their host and hostess.
Edith Wharton -- The House of Mirth
Her presence proved somehow less irreducible to soft particles than Ralph had expected in the natural perturbation of his sense of the perfect solubility of that of his cousin; for the correspondent of the Interviewer prompted mirth in him, and he had long since decided that the crescendo of mirth should be the flower of his declining days.
Henry James -- The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1
Her presence proved somehow less irreducible to soft particles than Ralph had expected in the natural perturbation of his sense of the perfect solubility of that of his cousin; for the correspondent of the Interviewer prompted mirth in him, and he had long since decided that the crescendo of mirth should be the flower of his declining days.
Henry James -- The Portrait of a Lady - Volumes 1 & 2
Without overgeneralizing, it may be stated that an inherent and irreducible feature of any bathroom-tissue pool imple. mented at the office level, in an environment (i. e., building) in which comfort stations are distributed on a per-floor basis (i. e., in which several offices share a single facility) is that provision must be made within the confines of the individual office for temporary stationing of bathroom tissue distribution units (i. e., rolls).
Neal Stephenson -- Snow Crash
...for any reason left behind them some monument, some structure of marble and brick and stone that still stands; so that even when the gas lamps went out and the planes came in and the office buildings crowded the blocks of Canal Street, something irreducible of beauty and romance remained; not in every street perhaps, but in so many that the landscape is for me the landscape of those times always, and walking now in the starlit streets of the Quarter or the Garden District I am in those...
Anne Rice -- Interview with the Vampire
I didn't reflect on it at the time—indeed, not until many years later—but what I was experiencing was the irreducibly real Japan: the Japan that had existed before the militaristic epoch that culminated in the Pacific War, and that will continue into the next millennium.
James Bradley -- Flags of Our Fathers
It was as if he were a single whole, grasped by her first glance at him, like some irreducible absolute, like an axiom not to be explained any further, as if she knew everything about him by direct perception, and what awaited her now was only the process of identifying her knowledge.
Ayn Rand -- Atlas Shrugged
Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two-existence and consciousness-are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end.
Ayn Rand -- Atlas Shrugged
What anthem did Bloom chant partially in anticipation of that multiple, ethnically irreducible consummation?
James Joyce -- Ulysses

Dictionary / pronunciation — Google^®Dictionary list — Onelook.com^®

Search for other examples by interest

Interest — Source