How to Use gunboat in a Sentence

gunboat

noun
  • James Hughes, had taken the precaution of painting large American flags on the gunboat to prevent any mistaken fire.
    Brad Lendon, CNN, 26 May 2023
  • Armed guards in black shirts roam the decks, and gunboats from a navy base in nearby Haifa patrol.
    Stanley Reed Ofir Berman, New York Times, 27 July 2023
  • How the city’s outpouring for the victims of a horrific 1905 gunboat explosion in San Diego Bay helped turn this into a Navy town.
    San Diego Union-Tribune, 30 Dec. 2022
  • This story has been corrected to reflect that work to raise and preserve the gunboat is in the proposal stage, not already underway.
    Wilson Ring, The Seattle Times, 4 June 2017
  • In the center of this Mediterranean tableau, at the end of a long quay in the port of Augusta, is a jarring anomaly: a gray Italian gunboat, on whose rear deck hundreds huddle under heavy brown blankets.
    Alex Perry, Newsweek, 10 June 2015
  • The flotilla included an even older ship, a former Russian gunboat named the Politkofsky reduced into a coal barge.
    David Reamer, Anchorage Daily News, 15 May 2022
  • The former queries were answered, but (the American gunboat’s commander) politely refused to answer the last one.
    Brad Lendon, CNN, 26 May 2023
  • Gaza fishermen are blocked by Israeli gunboats and forbidden to venture beyond six miles.
    William Booth, Washington Post, 6 Aug. 2017
  • More than two decades after it was discovered at the bottom of Lake Champlain, a Revolutionary War gunboat will be raised, preserved and displayed for the public.
    Washington Post, 4 June 2017
  • Constant fire from river gunboats and land forces made their position untenable.
    James B. Nelson, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 17 Aug. 2017
  • In the 19th century American gunboats forced the Japanese shogunate to open its markets to foreigners.
    The Economist, 5 Oct. 2017
  • The flying gunboats typically engage targets at a range of two miles or more, which implies an ADS far more powerful than System 1 has been developed.
    David Hambling, WIRED, 5 Dec. 2006
  • Not only can Neptune batteries strike farther and harder than any gunboat can do—they’re unsinkable, too. Follow me on Twitter.
    David Axe, Forbes, 19 Mar. 2021
  • The Jersey gunboat stunt was necessary because the Garden of Eden promised by Johnson has already become a dense jungle of bureaucratic tedium.
    Fintan O’Toole, The New York Review of Books, 13 May 2021
  • Over the next 18 months, a reasonably effective convoy system was put in place, but more tankers hit mines and were attacked by Iranian gunboats, further elevating tensions.
    James Stavridis, Time, 25 June 2019
  • In 2013, small Navy patrol ships engaged Iranian gunboats at least three times in international waters.
    Michael S. Schmidt and Helene Cooper, New York Times, 14 Jan. 2016
  • The sailors on the gunboats undertook a last-minute mission without proper training or equipment and were captured after straying into the waters surrounding an Iranian naval base on Farsi Island.
    T. Christian Miller, ProPublica, 17 Jan. 2020
  • Bolshevik henchmen on the Soviet gunboat Red October seized the islands from American settlers.
    Thomas Emanuel Dans, WSJ, 4 Nov. 2022
  • In real history, this is the day that a ragtag group of soldiers pull off one of the most audacious operations of the entire war: sail gunboats into the heart of enemy territory, burn Southern plantations, and rescue all the enslaved people.
    Rachel Kaufman, Smithsonian, 13 May 2018
  • Still, the enviros stand ready to man kayaks, paddleboards and gunboats to defend our offshore treasures, particularly given the president’s call to review marine sanctuaries.
    Steve Lopez, latimes.com, 20 May 2017
  • More than 100 cruise missiles, launched from warplanes and gunboats, struck three Syrian facilities: a scientific research centre used to produce chemical weapons near the capital of Damascus and two military bases further north.
    The Economist, 14 Apr. 2018

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