motifs

The "polka dot queen" channelled hallucinations and battles with mental health into vibrant art featuring her trademark dots, nets and infinity motifs over a career spanning decades and continents.

From Barron's ● Aug. 27, 2026

A novelist explores narrative, making sense of themes, motifs and sensations to try to communicate about the complexity of a globe with some eight billion people in it.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 13, 2026

More elaborate designs, including hatched bands, grids, and diamond-shaped motifs, also showed evidence of rotation, translation, repetition, and "embedding," i.e., the ability to build hierarchical levels of signs within the same surface.

From Science Daily ● Aug. 9, 2026

So birds adapted for tropical forests use different acoustic building blocks, or motifs, to those from temperate regions.

From BBC ● Jul. 23, 2026

The robin sings flexible songs, containing a variety of motifs that he rearranges to his liking; the notes in each motif constitute the syntax, and the possibilities for variation produce a considerable repertoire.

From "The Lives of a Cell" by Lewis Thomas