Sentence examples for multivalent from inspiring English sources

After conquering the Aghlabid capital al-Qayrawān (in present-day Tunisia), he helped free from a Sijilmassa prison his imam, ʿUbayd Allāh, who declared himself the mahdī, using a multivalent word that could have quite different meanings for different constituencies.

His work cannot be properly understood, however, without a thorough knowledge of mystical psychology, expressed in multivalent images.

The text, as academics might say, is multivalent, at odds with itself.

After Shawn retired and the magazine's fiction section became more of a free-for-all, more multivalent and multiethnic, the "New Yorker story" began to look like a form in well-deserved retirement — a relic of an era when subscribers had still had the patience and the time, in New Canaan, in Armonk, on a beach in the Hamptons, to read slow-moving stories in which nothing much happened at the end.

It was actively stunning to hear his works in the airy, chilly churches of Copenhagen, where the music seemed to crystallize out of the air and become an organic, multivalent thing.

The causes of the P.C.'s catastrophic collapse — from seventy seats in the provincial legislature to a mere ten, with the N.D.P. surging from four to a fifty-three-seat majority — are as many and multivalent as you might imagine would come to roost in a body politic after nearly forty-four years of nearly uncontested governance.

Imagine, for the moment, a set of networked, self-correcting computers, programmed to pursue a deliberately vague, long-term goal: say, "Make as many significant calculations as you can, and try to make more than any other computer in the lab," with "significant" left deliberately multivalent, open-ended.

In the context of the ever-expanding Web, where apps and sites live in some multivalent state of becoming and unravelling and becoming again, the preliminary grade of incomplete may not be so bad for MOOCs.