How to Use cockeyed in a Sentence
cockeyed
adjective-
One of the cockeyed squid's eyes is big, bulging and yellow.
—Elizabeth Preston, Discover Magazine, 21 Feb. 2017
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The small Malevich, of cockeyed red and black squares on white, elates.
—Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 21 Dec. 2020
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The situations aren’t the same, but there is a cockeyed parallel.
—Nick Canepa, sandiegouniontribune.com, 30 May 2017
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The roads have been laid cockeyed to the coast and are interrupted by a handful of lagoons that separate the town’s three main districts.
—Wyatt Williams, Harper's Magazine, 17 Aug. 2021
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Put lid back on slightly cockeyed and crank heat again until second side is browned, 2–3 minutes.
—Claire Saffitz, Bon Appetit, 3 Oct. 2017
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The cockeyed miscreant and stand-out basketball player was at least a full foot taller than me, dumb as a box of bullfrogs, and had breath that smelled like a sewage plant.
—Goldie Taylor, Rolling Stone, 12 Feb. 2023
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For that bit of cockeyed optimism, NASA has history on its side.
—Jeffrey Kluger, Time, 15 Apr. 2022
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Democrats these days make Cassandra from the Trojan War seem like a cockeyed optimist.
—Walter Shapiro, The New Republic, 16 Aug. 2021
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Beside the small store was a cockeyed shipping container meant for cold storage.
—Zachariah Hughes, Anchorage Daily News, 24 Sep. 2022
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To be fair, though, Biden has often veered into cockeyed optimism whether an election was near or not.
—Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times, 25 Sep. 2022
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Beetles in various states of repair are parked around the place, some sitting cockeyed with busted lights and flattened tires.
—Jesse Leavenworth, courant.com, 22 June 2017
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His right hand shakes, his arm is weak and his posture in the saddle has become cockeyed, yet his idea of taking care of himself is consulting a horse doctor.
—Joe Morgenstern, WSJ, 30 Dec. 2021
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But Chickie is obstinate in his cockeyed optimism, even when he’s being shot at in a foxhole with no weapon.
—Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 13 Sep. 2022
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All of this goes into Vaughn’s cockeyed pop-culture Cuisinart (much as henchmen go into Poppy’s meat grinder).
—Gary Thompson, Philly.com, 20 Sep. 2017
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Sooner or later, the long, hard hours in the studio had a way of turning even cockeyed optimists into pragmatists.
—Jed Perl, The New York Review of Books, 7 Mar. 2019
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This seemingly insignificant change sent the craft along its cockeyed path.
—Maya Wei-Haas, Smithsonian, 9 Jan. 2017
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But it’s a cult classic waiting to happen, a cockeyed look at a time and place in America when the rules hadn’t yet hardened and seemingly anything could happen — for good and for ill.
—Keith Phipps, Vulture, 18 Jan. 2021
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The emergency exit door was sticking out in front of his seat, forcing him to angle his legs for the better part of 10 hours, leaving his frame a little cockeyed and sore by touchdown.
—Matthew Futterman, New York Times, 7 July 2023
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Ms. McKenzie’s second novel, may be her most cockeyed concoction to date.
—Jennifer Senior, New York Times, 27 Jan. 2016
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Miriam’s brother picked up a reindeer calf that had tucked itself sleepily between the fence and ground, rump out, and carefully carried it, legs cockeyed, inside the gates.
—Juliana Hanle, Scientific American, 18 Nov. 2019
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Her painful and cockeyed attempts to help Benny will resonate with anyone who ever parented a teenager.
—Mary Ann Gwinn, Los Angeles Times, 23 Sep. 2021
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To its credit, Stranger Things 3 approaches mall culture from a cockeyed perspective.
—Darren Franich, EW.com, 4 July 2019
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The turn-signal lever, pivoting on an east-west axis, is wonderfully cockeyed, too.
—Larry Griffin, Car and Driver, 11 Apr. 2023
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This veteran writer is always amazed at how the overwhelming share of Wall Street guests on TV business shows adopt the role of perpetual, cockeyed optimists.
—Shawn Tully, Fortune, 23 Mar. 2022
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Nearly everyone thinks it’s a cockeyed plan, but the patriarchal tycoon plows ahead anyway.
—Town & Country, 31 Oct. 2022
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Director Lynne Ramsay delivers the movie (a brief 89 minutes) in a mad jumble of filters and colors and angles — fake-out scenes, flashbacks and cockeyed action sequences.
—Gary Thompson, Philly.com, 11 Apr. 2018
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Still others are batty, squirrelly, bug-eyed, cockeyed cuckoos, who are mad as March hares, who are crazy as coots, loons, or bedbugs, who come at us like bats out of hell with their monkeyshines and drive us buggy with their horsing around.
—Richard Lederer, San Diego Union-Tribune, 30 Apr. 2022
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There's a subtlety in their insanity, a shared cockeyed grin about how ludicrous their cases are getting.
—Darren Franich, EW.com, 6 Dec. 2022
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Ingray has a scheme to earn favor with her mother by breaking a notorious criminal out of prison — a scheme that, fortunately for her, does not go completely cockeyed.
—N.k. Jemisin, New York Times, 6 Sep. 2017
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Even in scenes with Harrelson, who pays Rex with everything from cockeyed optimism to gut-checking honesty, Ella proves a worthy scene partner.
—Rick Bentley, idahostatesman, 10 Aug. 2017
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'cockeyed.' 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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