as in searching
to look through (as a place) carefully or thoroughly in an effort to find or discover something
rifled the desk drawer in search of the insurance policy
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Recent Examples of rifling
Another goal against Fulham on Sunday continued Cunha’s purple patch; collecting a no-look pass from Casemiro on the right of the penalty area before rifling a powerful effort into the roof of Bernd Leno’s net.
—
Carl Anka, New York Times, 5 Feb. 2026
Heise worked her way into the left faceoff circle before rifling a shot just under the crossbar to give the Frost the win and keep Vancouver winless on the road.
—CBS News, 28 Dec. 2025
Best All-Time NFL Wide Receivers Starting slow in the NFL matters more than ending the season with a win streak, unless that win streak is rifling off 8-10 wins.
—James Brizuela, MSNBC Newsweek, 1 Sep. 2025
Carl Anka, New York Times, 5 Feb. 2026
Heise worked her way into the left faceoff circle before rifling a shot just under the crossbar to give the Frost the win and keep Vancouver winless on the road.
—CBS News, 28 Dec. 2025
Best All-Time NFL Wide Receivers Starting slow in the NFL matters more than ending the season with a win streak, unless that win streak is rifling off 8-10 wins.
—James Brizuela, MSNBC Newsweek, 1 Sep. 2025
Recent Examples of Synonyms for rifling
Verb
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Schacht, a lean clinical psychologist with boyish features, has spent much of his career searching for medications to treat alcohol addiction.—
Dhruv Khullar,
New Yorker,
9 Feb. 2026
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The bodycam video was an eye-opening look at the frightening aftermath of the Brown campus shooting when police were searching room-by-room for the suspect, trying to comfort and care for terrified students, and trying to coordinate with campus police to get past locked doors.—
Corky Siemaszko,
NBC news,
9 Feb. 2026
Verb
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With the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, York then marshaled forces to create one single telescope that could map hundreds of millions of objects in the sky — a central telescope systematically scanning the sky, and then releasing massive quantities of data publicly available to any scientist.—
Bob Goldsborough,
Chicago Tribune,
7 Feb. 2026
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Facial recognition tools have also become widely available to law enforcement agencies across the country, but there was a time when they were largely used as investigative tools, using photos of individual suspects rather than proactively scanning people in the field.—
Matt Lavietes,
NBC news,
6 Feb. 2026
Verb
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Planetary scientist Jeff Plescia of Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory soon began to search the LROC imagery for Soviet landers, combing Oceanus Procellarum despite knowing that success was unlikely.—
Ilya Ferapontov,
Scientific American,
5 Feb. 2026
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Pima County sheriffs and the FBI returned to Nancy Guthrie's home Wednesday evening, putting up crime scene tape and combing through the property.—
Sarah Lynch Baldwin,
CBS News,
5 Feb. 2026
Cite this Entry
“Rifling.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/rifling. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.
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