How to Use rifle through in a Sentence

rifle through

idiom
  • Normal, who slept with one eye open, watching Love rifle through my room.
    Shelley Puhak, The Atlantic, 20 July 2022
  • The victim then goes still, and the suspect uses the man’s belt loops to flip the unconscious body over to rifle through his front and back pants pockets.
    Danielle Wallace, Fox News, 25 July 2021
  • Police say Abell stuck the rifle through the passenger side window of the man’s car and began threatening him.
    Cliff Pinckard, cleveland, 13 Oct. 2020
  • Cruz, who was expelled from the school the prior year, had shoved his rifle through a glass window on the internal door to spray the first-floor classroom with bullets.
    Rebecca Rosenberg, Fox News, 20 July 2022
  • The Oregonian reported that some in the crowd tried to hold the assailants back during the attack, while others began to rifle through the man’s truck.
    Robert Gearty, Fox News, 18 Aug. 2020
  • An unconscious man sprawled face-down on the sidewalk at the corner of Jones and Ellis streets while another man kneeled down to rifle through his pockets.
    Heather Knight, SFChronicle.com, 6 June 2020
  • Kantor proceeded to rifle through the fridge, sniffing jars of pickles, chili sauce and garlic—nothing.
    Stephani Sutherland, Scientific American, 18 Nov. 2020
  • The car appeared to back-up as another officer — Dinesh Jagar — fired three times with his rifle through the car’s windshield.
    Michael Williams, SFChronicle.com, 19 Dec. 2020
  • As three officers in an unmarked pickup pulled into the lot, an officer in the backseat fired a rifle through the windshield and struck Monterrosa, 22, in the head.
    Michael Cabanatuan, SFChronicle.com, 9 Aug. 2020
  • That's why our team of gear-savvy editors decided to rifle through the vast stores of new(ish) outdoor cooking options to find the five best for all your summer cookouts—and well beyond.
    Paul Kita, menshealth.com, 7 Apr. 2023
  • One needs courage and more than a little trust to let an outsider come into her home to rifle through personal belongings with the goal of streamlining the homestead for its greater good.
    Marni Jameson, orlandosentinel.com, 21 Jan. 2022
  • Videos taken by Ratchadawan show the elephant extending its trunk to rifle through cupboards and drawers, knocking over dishes.
    Jessie Yeung, CNN, 22 June 2021
  • Sometimes, her mother told her, gang members stop traffic to rifle through peoples’ phone messages.
    Los Angeles Times, 30 Dec. 2021
  • There are few jewelry boxes that would be more interesting to rifle through than Princess Margaret's.
    Olivia Hosken, Town & Country, 22 Aug. 2021
  • Armed Taliban intelligence and security agents show up unannounced at people’s homes to rifle through them, and search their phones at checkpoints across the city.
    David Zucchino The New York Times, New York Times, 12 Aug. 2022
  • To look back at his movies — many of them more amiable than side-splitting — is to rifle through an assortment of hits and misses, a catalog of comic imperfection.
    Los Angeles Times, 14 Feb. 2022
  • Due to privacy concerns, the team couldn’t rifle through individual records, and relied on an algorithm to do the job instead.
    Ed Yong, Discover Magazine, 12 Sep. 2012
  • The officer — whose name has not been officially released — fired five rounds from a rifle through the windshield of an unmarked police pickup, one of which struck Monterrosa, who was on his knees or crouching at the time.
    Michael Cabanatuan, SFChronicle.com, 7 Aug. 2020
  • There are no surprises here as these two sly wastrels repair their relationship, and in a running time of just 84 minutes, there’s hardly time to rifle through their deeper, darker baggage.
    Guy Lodge, Variety, 23 Jan. 2023
  • ChatGPT delivered simple answers in an accessible way and didn’t ask users to rifle through blue links.
    Will Oremus, Washington Post, 27 Jan. 2023
  • Police officials also released surveillance camera footage of Hale firing an AR-15-style rifle through the school's glass doors and stalking the hallways looking for victims to shoot.
    Bill Hutchinson, ABC News, 26 May 2023
  • On May 14, Gendron who was outfitted with tactical gear, carried an AR-15 assault rifle through the parking lot of a supermarket and opened fire, shooting four people.
    Ashlee Banks, Essence, 6 June 2022
  • Yet the private company got total authority to rifle through the actual ballots and 400 voting machines from the election.
    Star Tribune, 12 May 2021
  • The marketing company also developed a new packaging strategy to allow customers to grab-and-go rather than rifle through a pile of produce during the pandemic.
    Dallas News, 29 Dec. 2020
  • The real political goal here is to create a mechanism for triggering audits—probably through an algorithm—so the IRS can rifle through all of a taxpayer’s business and other financial records.
    Peter J Reilly, Forbes, 25 Oct. 2021
  • Despite the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, these government officers rifle through families’ refrigerators and medicine cabinets and inspect children’s unclothed bodies without informed consent.
    Eli Hager, ProPublica, 5 June 2023

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