How to Use bell curve in a Sentence

bell curve

noun
Definition of bell curvenext
  • Just imposing on faculty a bell curve in grading every course would be immense intellectual hygiene.
    — Brian T. Allen, National Review, 11 Jan. 2024
  • It's been around and the bell curve has always been around.
    — James Brown, USA TODAY, 18 Sep. 2022
  • The graph of this looks a bit like an off-kilter bell curve.
    — Phil Plait, Discover Magazine, 26 Nov. 2010
  • Instead, the right way to focus may be on the middle of the bell curve.
    — David Rock, Forbes, 6 May 2021
  • The shape of this graph is more like a bell curve somewhat flattened out at the top.
    — Eugenia Cheng, WSJ, 19 June 2019
  • It’s on all the other trails—the ones that fall in the fat part of the bell curve, the blues and tame blacks—where this bike really shines.
    — Outside Online, 1 July 2020
  • The current number nuclear weapons was at the bottom of the bell curve on the slide.
    — Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, 11 Oct. 2017
  • So our waves of UFO sightings tend to take one of two distinct shapes: a sharp peak or a bell curve.
    — Sarah Scoles, Wired, 3 Mar. 2020
  • Most people — around 50 percent — fall right in the middle of the chronotype bell curve.
    — Brian Resnick, Vox, 27 Apr. 2018
  • On any kind of change issue, the majority of leaders land in the middle of a bell curve.
    — David Rock, Forbes, 6 May 2021
  • Think back to the bell curve in math class - most of the data is clumped around the middle, with more extreme events on the edges as frequency trails off.
    — Matthew Cappucci, Anchorage Daily News, 23 Aug. 2022
  • In real life, the distribution of how much people drive looks more or less like a bell curve.
    — Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker, 30 Sep. 2023
  • This despite the fact that the profession of science is skewed toward the right end of the intelligence bell curve.
    — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 14 May 2011
  • With the usual bell curve in full effect, herewith are our midterm grades for Wimbledon 2018.
    — Jon Wertheim, SI.com, 7 July 2018
  • This curve is similar to the Gaussian bell curve, or the downward parabola.
    — Quanta Magazine, 13 Oct. 2016
  • Will the dominance of the subscription model end up protecting niche tastes or result in a great rush to the middle of the bell curve?
    — Chris Jones, chicagotribune.com, 17 July 2019
  • The amount of the credit is calculated based on both earned and unearned income and is distributed in a bell curve.
    — Amber Gray-Fenner, Forbes, 27 Feb. 2021
  • If the course of an infection resembles a bell curve on a chart, a PCR test is good at detecting the infection all the way through.
    — NBC News, 30 Dec. 2021
  • There’s a giant missing piece in the middle of the bell curve, where all the studies with non-significant results should be.
    — Alex Hutchinson, Outside Online, 22 July 2022
  • This bell curve, called a wave packet, is centered at position A.
    — Quanta Magazine, 20 Oct. 2020
  • Even if a margin of 9.5 points is close to correct in the middle of the bell curve of possible outcomes, the margins have to heavily favor Auburn.
    — Christopher Smith, al, 17 Nov. 2020
  • My hypothesis and recommendation to founders is to be on the outskirts of this bell curve.
    — Vibhu Singh, Forbes, 16 Aug. 2022
  • The number also appears in bell curves, which are found in statistics about random variables that add up.
    — Kat Friedrich, Popular Mechanics, 16 Mar. 2023
  • The center of the bell curve has shifted slightly, with the world just over a degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than in the preindustrial era.
    — Sarah Kaplan and Andrew Ba Tran, Anchorage Daily News, 5 Jan. 2022
  • To understand how the climate crisis is changing the playing field, Mann suggests thinking of weather events on a bell curve.
    — Rachel Ramirez, CNN, 28 June 2021
  • That is, pitch ability follows a bell curve: Most people are average singers.
    — Bryan Nichols, The Conversation, 16 Aug. 2022
  • Picture a bell curve—the graph that illustrates a normal distribution, with most of the data congregating at the center, with long tails at the high and low ends.
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 14 June 2021
  • Other data sets of people’s driving distances show a bell curve, with some people driving a lot, a few very little, and most somewhere in the middle.
    — Cathleen O’Grady, Science | AAAS, 24 Aug. 2021
  • Over the past two years, spending for the four cryptocurrency advertisers has followed a classic bell curve.
    — Brad Adgate, Forbes, 24 Jan. 2023
  • But the examples in this book are at the very far end of the delusion bell curve, representing landmark cases in the history of psychology.
    — Lucinda Robb, Washington Post, 5 Aug. 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'bell curve.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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