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
• In my view, the biggest mistake scientists make is to claim that this is all somehow simple and therefore to imply that anyone who doesn't get it is a dunce.
  — Naomi Oreskes, Scientific American, 21 June 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

Last Updated: 22 Dec 2024