How to Use investigate in a Sentence

investigate

verb
  • The manager promised to investigate when we pointed out an error on our bill.
  • The police are still investigating the murder.
  • He was investigated for his involvement in the incident.
  • The accident was thoroughly investigated.
  • Authorities are investigating both the cause of the fire and whether the blaze is to blame for the woman’s death.
    Howard Koplowitz | Hkoplowitz@al.com, al, 7 June 2023
  • Darby is in the middle of investigating something in the cold and snow of Iceland.
    Daniel D'addario, Variety, 19 Dec. 2023
  • The church is investigating, and Bickle stepped down from his post.
    Cherie Deville, Rolling Stone, 11 Nov. 2023
  • The task force created to investigate the killings was formed in 1988 at a time when homicides in the region were rising.
    Teri Figueroa, San Diego Union-Tribune, 30 Oct. 2023
  • The government is currently investigating what caused the piece to blow off from the plane.
    Asher Notheis, Washington Examiner, 15 Jan. 2024
  • Runge has been investigating the six and thus Jamal over the past seven months.
    Liam Quinn, Peoplemag, 3 Mar. 2024
  • He was supposed to be the hero who caught bad guys and investigated evildoers.
    Scott Johnson, Rolling Stone, 19 June 2023
  • The death of a man found in a creek in Montgomery County will be investigated as a homicide, police said Wednesday.
    Omari Daniels, Washington Post, 12 July 2023
  • Smith also is investigating Trump’s efforts to block the results of the 2020 election.
    Devlin Barrett, Josh Dawsey, Spencer S. Hsu, Perry Stein, The Washington Post, Anchorage Daily News, 25 May 2023
  • Northbound lanes were closed for about three and a half hours as CHP officers investigated.
    Teri Figueroa, San Diego Union-Tribune, 16 Mar. 2024
  • Traffic lanes in the area were closed while police investigated.
    Teri Figueroa, San Diego Union-Tribune, 23 Sep. 2023
  • As the youngest and seemingly most directionless of the trio, Mabel is keen to investigate the death to have something to do and distract herself.
    Radhika Menon, ELLE, 8 Aug. 2023
  • Crispr can be used to knock out genes to investigate their function, but its real power lies in being able to change an organism’s DNA.
    Emily Mullin, WIRED, 19 Dec. 2023
  • That briefly cost the coach his job as U.S. Soccer investigated, then cleared, Berhalter of any wrongdoing.
    Houston Mitchell, Los Angeles Times, 6 Oct. 2023
  • Lee was being investigated as part of a probe of eight individuals, but his was the name leading the headlines.
    Rebecca Sun, The Hollywood Reporter, 3 Jan. 2024
  • Three of the cases were investigated as suicides, with the cause of the death for the fourth individual determined as acute heart failure.
    Sophie Carson, Journal Sentinel, 1 Sep. 2023
  • Still, a team investigating Bean’s disappearance met to review the information and shared it with the FBI, as well.
    Marlene Lenthang, NBC News, 1 Sep. 2023
  • The question is whether all these people would have investigated, surveilled, harassed, written about, and attacked her in the same way if the Harvard president in this case would have been White.
    Harry Bruinius, The Christian Science Monitor, 4 Jan. 2024
  • Others investigate the six most important inches in golf — the ones between your ears.
    Brian McCallen, Travel + Leisure, 28 May 2023
  • My research investigates how B cells are able to slip past the checkpoints the immune system has in place to guard against autoreactivity.
    Aimee Pugh Bernard, Discover Magazine, 24 Nov. 2023
  • In a new paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, Davies and his colleagues have fit the icy, gaseous pieces together to investigate the role that this weird substance could play in climate change.
    Matt Simon, WIRED, 7 Dec. 2023
  • Students walked out of their classes on Nov. 28 in support of the athlete and school employees being investigated.
    Kiara Alfonseca, ABC News, 5 Dec. 2023
  • More than 40 athletes from Iowa and Iowa State also were being investigated by the state’s gambling commission.
    Chris Bumbaca, USA TODAY, 25 May 2023
  • The commission investigates complaints against court justices and judges.
    Sarah Lapidus, The Arizona Republic, 5 Jan. 2024
  • Space agencies in Japan and the United States recently sent spacecraft to investigate, nudge, or bring back samples from these hurtling space rocks, and after a rocky start, the space mining industry is once again on the ascent.
    WIRED, 20 Oct. 2023
  • McHenry said deputies are investigating to see if anyone else was involved.
    Alexis Martin and Mildred Fallen, The Enquirer, 4 Mar. 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'investigate.' 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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