How to Use gawky in a Sentence
gawky
adjective-
The Woods of 28 years ago was all gawky teenage promise.
—Eamon Lynch, Golfweek, 11 Feb. 2020
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Like the scrawny, sixth-round pick out of Michigan, with the gawky 40-yard dash and the chip on his shoulder.
—Ryan Kartje, Orange County Register, 6 Feb. 2017
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This is sort of out there, but Luke Falk is kinda skinny, a bit of a gawky athlete.
—Tim Rohan, SI.com, 23 Feb. 2018
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My favorite person on the show was Maria, who sparked gawky-sweet chemistry with Vinny.
—Darren Franich, EW.com, 28 June 2019
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As Plumb, Pappas is awkward but likable in the lead role, and her gawky charm works well with the film’s quirky approach to its story.
—Kimber Myers, latimes.com, 11 May 2017
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How else to explain the intimate, gawky tenderness with which the heads of the dead Christ and the man supporting him touch, almost in a kiss?
—Holland Cotter, New York Times, 12 Oct. 2017
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Anna is blonde and tall and gawky, with braces; Maya is shorter, with a bowl cut forced on her by her mother, and a retainer.
—Naomi Fry, The New Yorker, 28 Sep. 2020
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When a gawky teen restores a 1958 Plymouth Fury, the car takes on a life of its own and begins terrorizing those in its way.
—Ed Stockly, Los Angeles Times, 9 Apr. 2021
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London wasn’t quite swinging yet, and British rock was barely emerging from its gawky teen phase.
—Elizabeth Winder, Rolling Stone, 24 July 2023
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The moment for raabs—these gawky, uncoiffed survivors of our soul-leaching winters—is short.
—Jonathan Kauffman, Bon Appétit, 13 Apr. 2022
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His 6-foot-6 height, which affords him a better view of where the ball must go, would be a detriment if Herbert were gawky and ponderous.
—Tom Krasovic, San Diego Union-Tribune, 12 Sep. 2021
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But now, in adulthood, those former gawky adolescents are getting the last laugh.
—Laura Neilson, WSJ, 14 Dec. 2023
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The Sims has a slapstick sense of humor fit for gawky teen years; a Sim can get dumped in the hallway, strike a T-pose for a viral challenge, and then slink away for class in the span of a minute.
—Wired, 16 July 2022
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Comparisons were made to Barack Obama, on the basis that the two men both had a certain gawky charm and both appeared to inspire an enormous amount of hope.
—The Economist, 5 Oct. 2017
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For motorists travelling north on I-93, 50 Prospect looms in the distance like an overly tall, gawky teenager.
—James McCown, BostonGlobe.com, 3 Aug. 2023
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Other times, the tower seems more like a gawky, gentle giant, awkwardly standing on the edge of a group photo.
—Patrick Kingsley Amit Elkayam, New York Times, 9 Oct. 2022
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Think Smokey Robinson’s songwriting prowess, and the evolution of the Supremes from gawky teenagers to hit-making divas.
—Mara Reinstein, Billboard, 23 Aug. 2019
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The young lady, a gawky girl of 13, was a distant cousin whose father had recently become King Emperor.
—Lily Rothman, Time, 9 Apr. 2021
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The splashy, ornate style rose to prominence around 2015, the year Gucci designer Alessandro Michele debuted a weird, gawky new look brimming with prints, frills, and colors.
—Marc Bain, Quartzy, 7 Dec. 2019
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While the 11th-generation Civic has a far more streamlined body than its gawky predecessor, Honda kept the underpinnings mostly the same—and that's a good thing.
—Joey Capparella, Car and Driver, 31 Mar. 2022
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Eva Löbau plays a gawky 27-year-old teacher who arrives at a new job ready to show off her progressive pedagogical methods.
—Ben Kenigsberg, New York Times, 26 Jan. 2017
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While most women aren’t used to wearing big, sometimes gawky hats, the majority of Derby-goers are sporting some type of head accessory at the track.
—Taylor M. Riley, The Courier-Journal, 12 Apr. 2018
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The 32-year-old cofounder and co-CEO of Bitmain, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency mining firm, displays a strikingly reserved and gawky demeanor.
—Robert Hackett, Fortune, 8 June 2018
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For those of us who grew up with her cooking shows on public television – a TV career that began in 1963 and lasted for decades – seeing her here in all her gawky eccentricity is good for the soul.
—Peter Rainer, The Christian Science Monitor, 12 Nov. 2021
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Byrne's capacity for shouts, grunts and other sounds is a sort of gawky update on Brown's work, and the almost militaristic organization of the band, too, reminds of the Godfather of Soul.
—Andrew Dansby, Houston Chronicle, 29 Apr. 2018
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The question remains whether researchers can wrangle their gawky teenage NISQ machines into doing something useful.
—Tom Simonite Sophia Chen, WIRED, 22 Feb. 2023
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Here, teenagers feel like real gawky young adults, instead of the polished twenty-somethings who far exceed the attractiveness of real high schoolers in all their pubescent, hormonal glory.
—Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 1 May 2020
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The play is narrated by the novel’s three youngest characters, who are all played with childlike humor, guilelessness and gawky physicality.
—Pam Kragen, San Diego Union-Tribune, 1 Dec. 2022
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Three women greeted me, three generations: an old woman at a stove, her daughter busying herself sifting maize flour, the gawky granddaughter sprawled on a wooden chair — her long legs stretched out, her feet on the arm of another chair.
—Paul Theroux, New York Times, 23 Sep. 2019
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Photographer Greg Kahn made four trips to Havana and several other Cuban cities to photograph the country's gawky arrival to modern global culture.
—National Geographic, 12 Dec. 2016
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'gawky.' 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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