How to Use weakling in a Sentence

weakling

noun
  • He's seen as a weakling, and he must be culled from the clan.
    Sergio Pereira, Space.com, 4 Nov. 2025
  • Experts say the storm may be slow-moving but is hardly a weakling.
    Daniel Cusick, Scientific American, 16 Sep. 2020
  • Despite his size, Donald was no weakling.
    Encyclopedia Britannica, 15 May 2026
  • Only weaklings try to shut everybody up and scorch any kind of dissent.
    Jay Nordlinger, National Review, 17 Apr. 2023
  • In nature, a lame duck is a weakling, a bird that can’t keep up with the flock and is easy pickings for predators.
    Oliver Staley, Quartz, 7 Nov. 2020
  • Neither of these big guys is a weakling opponent imported from out of town to make the local kid look good.
    Don Steinberg, Philly.com, 26 Apr. 2018
  • The Hawkeyes continued to use that combo to beat up on the conference’s weaklings.
    Rainer Sabin, Detroit Free Press, 28 Oct. 2019
  • Separating the weakling from the herd only heightened their fear.
    Brady MacDonald, Oc Register, 25 Sep. 2025
  • Europe increasingly looks like a 120-pound weakling that can’t keep the lights on.
    Kenneth Rapoza, Forbes, 17 Aug. 2022
  • The next weakling Minnesota will face is Maryland, a team that has lost four of five and slid into the abyss.
    Rainer Sabin, Detroit Free Press, 25 Oct. 2019
  • The diminutive vehicle isn’t a weakling, either.
    Andrew Paul, Popular Science, 29 Apr. 2026
  • Such incidents have given it a reputation as the tech weakling of Japan’s megabanks.
    Washington Post, 11 Mar. 2019
  • The script, alas, is a bit of a 98-pound weakling, but given the escapist demands probably sufficient to get the job done.
    Brian Lowry, CNN, 15 July 2022
  • Yeah, that’s not going to happen, but the Warriors have at least a chance of improving their 90-pound-weakling image.
    Scott Ostler, San Francisco Chronicle, 15 Aug. 2021
  • Against a backdrop of a slowing growth elsewhere, Greece is far from the weakling of Europe that was on the brink of bankruptcy just a few years ago.
    Stelios Bouras, Fortune, 26 Feb. 2020
  • My little weakling account (@rjallain) just has over 500 followers (notice no K).
    Rhett Allain, WIRED, 17 May 2011
  • Paul Hebron as father James, ruined by success, terrified of poverty, is both a brilliant man and a weakling.
    John Timpane, Philly.com, 12 Oct. 2017
  • The first two were over the weakling Giants and Redskins, but manhandling the contending Raiders should make folks take notice.
    Barry Wilner, chicagotribune.com, 25 Nov. 2019
  • Australia is here because of that and regarded as a tournament weakling, though the team earned some credit in a courageous 2-1 defeat to France.
    Martin Rogers, USA TODAY, 19 June 2018
  • Arkansas and five other states require weakling governors who can be overridden by simple majorities.
    John Brummett, Arkansas Online, 7 Mar. 2021
  • But with the Rockies looking a bit feisty (not to be mistaken with competent), what happens if the Giants can’t beat up on the division weaklings this year?
    Dieter Kurtenbach, Mercury News, 27 May 2026
  • That transformed the storm from a wandering weakling into into roaring Super Typhoon with winds swirling at 160 mph.
    Tom Yulsman, Discover Magazine, 31 July 2017
  • Coming off an historically bad year and a series of miserable starts, the Twins, for one day at least, morphed from 98-pound weaklings to heroes of the beach.
    Tom Powers, Twin Cities, 3 Apr. 2017
  • At first, Daryl finds himself on the wrong side of that privileged weakling weasel, otherwise known as Sebastian, son of Pamela Milton, who runs this town.
    Nick Romano, EW.com, 28 Feb. 2022
  • And the surrender or war over Korea that may follow will be but one part, however distressing or bloody, of the price this country will pay for a government administered by moral weaklings and lickspittles.
    Eliot A. Cohen, The Atlantic, 2 Oct. 2017
  • On the other side, Ukraine is a relative weakling in cyberspace that has become the first country to fight back against an invader by publicly calling up an international army of vigilante hackers.
    Christopher Mims, WSJ, 5 Mar. 2022
  • In this view, Facebook is a naive weakling afraid to take any enforcement action on its platform; Apple, on the other hand, is the practical one who never pretended to embrace free speech in the first place.
    Casey Newton, The Verge, 8 Aug. 2018
  • Criticizing Biden for not establishing a no-fly zone is a more specific charge than simply calling him a weakling—a tangible thing that the president could be doing in Ukraine but isn’t.
    Alex Shephard, The New Republic, 15 Mar. 2022
  • Mr Gandhi, who until recently was widely regarded as a political weakling, has begun offering a steady barrage of acerbic barbs, to growing effect.
    The Economist, 2 Nov. 2017
  • In his first film role, Bathily (whose father grew up in the eponymous housing complex) was an unlikely choice; the part of Youri would seem to require a nerdy, 98-pound weakling, staring passively at the stars.
    Washington Post, 28 Mar. 2022

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