improvise

If you pressed him a bit, he’d tell you that one of the qualities Colin looked for was an ability to improvise.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 2, 2026

“But when the time comes to improvise, I find it difficult. That still doesn’t come naturally to me in English.”

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 31, 2026

Watch the export miracle turn into a pumpkin or improvise.

From MarketWatch ● Jul. 27, 2026

Government contingency plans had "never been stress tested" and officials and ministers were "forced to improvise, establishing new emergency procurement and distribution systems within days".

From BBC ● Jul. 14, 2026

At a game like this, a gifted human player could always triumph over the game’s AI, because software couldn’t improvise.

From "Ready Player One: A Novel" by Ernest Cline

“But she’s not a scat singer. She improvises more in the technique of the Baroque period, expanding and contracting phrases or adding trills that deviate from the melody.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 11, 2026

An octet of guest artists improvises in certain passages embedded within the score but also plays written-out music with the rest of the orchestra.

From Seattle Times ● Feb. 21, 2024

It’s also a subtler homage than running a tornado through Kansas in black-and-white: Not until Wayne improvises a story for Scotty around “Dorothy” and rainbows does the connection become blazingly apparent.

From New York Times ● Dec. 26, 2023

Starzinski, a 15-year veteran at the Upright Citizens Brigade, improvises jokes through a megaphone and eggs on the cars to keep honking.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 16, 2023

Laura Keene improvises a line that refers to Lincoln, making the audience turn toward the side of the theater in order to witness his appearance.

From "Lincoln's Last Days: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever" by Bill O'Reilly

The army has set up an improvised morgue in Toledo because the city's existing facility could not receive all the corpses.

From Barron's ● Oct. 30, 2026

British counterterrorism police said Tuesday that the vans didn’t contain improvised explosives, but they recovered some fuel in the vehicles.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 29, 2026

LaManna improvised a stand to hold the fragile scroll while rotating it through an X-ray beam.

From Science Daily ● Sep. 26, 2026

Rosales is aware that the world has its eyes on L.A. and that people everywhere are learning the cultural vernacular improvised by Cali’s brown folks.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 9, 2026

Polyrhythm, as it has since been dubbed, had long existed in African tribal drumming, improvised on the spot by highly intuitive, skillful players, often in various states of trance.

From "The Story of Music" by Howard Goodall

For Leon Berkers, whose restaurant boat has been stuck in the mud for more than a month, adaptation has so far meant improvising fixes to keep "pots and pans from flying around."

From Barron's ● Aug. 15, 2026

At times, the piano players in his groups would simply back off during part of Rollins’ solos, loath to risk following the twisting pathways of his improvising.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 26, 2026

Israeli soldiers in Lebanon said that units were scrambling and were now improvising solutions such as covering military equipment and outposts with nets to trap the drones, a method Ukraine has long relied on.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 1, 2026

Greek yogurt is one of the few ingredients that has matched my energy in the kitchen: constantly improvising, making it work with what I got, and never letting things go to waste.

From Salon ● Apr. 28, 2026

We make angels and devils of our own want and regard, improvising from ourselves along the way.

From "Native Speaker" by Chang-rae Lee