as in incentives
something that arouses action or activity
seeing a Broadway play for the first time was the stimulus for her career in the theater
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Recent Examples of stimuli
By this decade, your body has started to naturally lose muscle mass, and putting on new muscle may be more difficult due to anabolic resistance, which blunts the muscle’s ability to respond to external stimuli like exercise and protein.
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Emma Loewe, Outside, 1 Jan. 2026
Word games, information sleuthing, instructional videos, and even just chatting with friends can provide positive stimuli.
—Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic, 23 Dec. 2025
Infants as young as six months respond to robotic stimuli in ways that mirror their responses to humans, suggesting that in certain contexts, the social cues that drive connection may work similarly across both humans and robots.
—Dr. Dana Suskind, Time, 18 Dec. 2025
The receptors in your hands respond to myriad stimuli-like pressures—vibrations in sync with 15 different families of neurons.
—Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez, Fortune, 16 Dec. 2025
The 3-2-1 rule involves organizing the last three hours of the day in way that reduces stimuli and gently prepare the body to enter a phase conducive to rest.
—Mélanie Nauche, Vogue, 15 Dec. 2025
Periods of rest, exercise, journaling, rituals, and switching off external stimuli help to channel the energy and avoid being overwhelmed by it.
—Hannah Madlener, Glamour, 12 Dec. 2025
External stimuli like a brush aren't necessary to run this powerful fluid management system in our bodies.
—Nicole Fallert, USA Today, 11 Dec. 2025
Without being able to compute directly from real stimuli, perceptual models could capture ideas in theory but fail simple real-world tests.
—Aamir Khollam, Interesting Engineering, 4 Nov. 2025
Recent Examples of Synonyms for stimuli
Noun
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Kansas and Missouri have spent the past 18 months trying to secure the team through sweeping stadium-funding incentives packages — which the Chiefs used last month to announce their intentions for a move to Kansas.—
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The country is largely focused on a self-sufficiency drive to build up its chipmaking capabilities, a push that’s included readying a new round of incentives of as much as $70 billion for the chip sector.—
Noun
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In October 2024 ahead of her own stay at MSG, Billie Eilish recorded encouragements to take the subways for environmental benefits.—
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Hints, counsels, warnings, remonstrations, even encouragements are, in the end, of limited value.—
Cite this Entry
“Stimuli.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/stimuli. Accessed 12 Jan. 2026.
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