linchpin
noun
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In his 1857 novel, Tom Brown’s School Days, Thomas Hughes describes the “cowardly” custom of “taking the linch-pins out of the farmers’ and bagmens’ gigs at the fairs.” The linchpin in question held the wheel on the carriage, and removing it made it likely that the wheel would come off as the vehicle moved. Such a pin was called a lynis in Old English; Middle English speakers added pin to form lynspin. By the early 20th century, English speakers were using linchpin for anything as critical to a complex situation as a linchpin is to a wagon, as when Winston Churchill, in 1930, wrote of Canada and the role it played in the relationship between Great Britain and the United States, that “no state, no country, no band of men can more truly be described as the linchpin of peace and world progress.”
Examples of linchpin in a Sentence
Prabhat Ranjan Mishra, Interesting Engineering, 10 Jan. 2026
Aikey also helped Stanford win a Pac-12 championship as a freshman in 2022, and was a linchpin on NCAA Women’s College Cup teams over the last three seasons.
—Kyle Newman, Denver Post, 8 Jan. 2026
Farther south, Diamond Valley Lake in Riverside County, a linchpin of the water supply for 20 million people in the Los Angeles region, was 94% full.
—Paul Rogers, Mercury News, 5 Jan. 2026
The dish is a linchpin in a meal that’s longer and more elaborate, and certainly pricier at $300 per person, than the concise tasting menu by which Kim first introduced his cooking to Los Angeles at 20-seat Kinn in Koreatown.
—Bill Addison, Los Angeles Times, 2 Jan. 2026
See All Example Sentences for linchpin
Cite this Entry
“Linchpin.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/linchpin. Accessed 12 Jan. 2026.
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linchpin
noun
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