How to Use dunce in a Sentence

dunce

noun
  • In flashbacks, William is a naive dunce and a smarmy creep.
    Scott Meslow, GQ, 28 May 2018
  • To be sure, the Tories have had more than their fair share of Chris Grayling-style dunces and time-servers.
    The Economist, 18 Dec. 2019
  • The next day, a New York tabloid put Manning’s face on its back page with a dunce cap perched atop his head.
    Bill Pennington, New York Times, 9 Dec. 2016
  • So, yes, let Spencer enjoy his First Amendment right to preach hate to his legion of dunces -- free and out in the open.
    Byron McCauley, Cincinnati.com, 17 Oct. 2017
  • Illinois is the class dunce, with six languishing schemes.
    The Economist, 14 Nov. 2019
  • Liberals want the generals to leak to the press and hint that Trump is a dunce whose blunders force wise men like themselves to clean up the mess.
    Victor Davis Hanson, Alaska Dispatch News, 22 June 2017
  • For some reason, a dunce in the editing room added an explanatory whirring noise on the soundtrack.
    Darren Franich, EW.com, 14 Sep. 2020
  • The nerd next door who's a whiz in geometry and a dunce in relationships.
    Neal Justin, Star Tribune, 25 Mar. 2021
  • The professors wore tall paper dunce caps and looked as shocked as the spectators, who watched from the university’s lawn, some with tears in their eyes.
    Marty Judge Community Voices Contributor, San Diego Union-Tribune, 20 Mar. 2021
  • Pena insists that his path to success, power, and money started in grammar school, when he was forced to wear a dunce hat.
    Los Angeles Times, 19 Apr. 2021
  • For most of this decade, the genre’s male stars have been strutters: egocentric, bumblingly flirtatious, a little dunce-y.
    Jon Caramanica, New York Times, 21 Sep. 2017
  • Wait to see the performance, you insufferable Philistine dunce.
    Nick Levine, refinery29.com, 24 Aug. 2019
  • Jardel flopped at Bolton, drifted off into obscurity and is now remembered as a Premier League dunce.
    SI.com, 27 Aug. 2019
  • Despite his very real affection for his mother-in-law, Lee found his father-in-law an amiable but annoying dunce.
    Allen C. Guelzo, National Review, 17 Sep. 2020
  • The coming elite would recognize the con of mass education and spare millions the dunce hat of the community college or the online university.
    Thomas Meaney, Harper's magazine, 20 Jan. 2020
  • At some point, all of original architect’s Jackson Gott’s fancy tile roofs and dunce-cap like decorative towers got chopped off.
    Jacques Kelly, baltimoresun.com, 9 Nov. 2019
  • Or, having sat mutely on its metaphorical dunce chair at the back of the class, can The Cosby Show ever be rerun on network television once its serial-rapist star has also served his time?
    Lionel Shriver, Harper's magazine, 10 Feb. 2019
  • The instant a Presidential election is over, everyone who worked on the losing campaign is recast as a dunce, and everyone on the winning side is reborn as a genius.
    Andrew Marantz, The New Yorker, 2 Mar. 2020
  • Will our entire cadre of older faculty members morph from larger-than-life sages into teeny little pariahs wearing dunce caps?
    Anne Fadiman, Wired, 17 June 2020
  • Reagan was famously called an amiable dunce, and that was unfair, but Reagan understood something [his predecessor] Carter did not.
    Lorraine Boissoneault, Smithsonian, 9 May 2017
  • Unfortunately for their students, these demented dunces still don’t have their acts together.
    Chuck Barney, The Mercury News, 15 Jan. 2017
  • But step into their britches; to be smartphone-era dunces careening into the singularity must be excruciating.
    Mary H. K. Choi, WIRED, 1 Nov. 2011
  • Corenswet originally auditioned for Ricardo, a role that Benjamin Barrett crafted into a mustachioed dunce to brilliant comedic effect.
    Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 26 Nov. 2019
  • What started as casual brutality—class enemies forced to wear ridiculous dunce caps or stand in stress positions—degenerated into outright sadism.
    Barbara Demick, The Atlantic, 18 Dec. 2020
  • The series has a cockeyed political perspective, flooding nefarious Democratic operatives alongside its Trumpling dunce-caps.
    Darren Franich, EW.com, 9 Apr. 2020

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