How to Use specious in a Sentence

specious

adjective
  • He justified his actions with specious reasoning.
  • Or get hold of a completely specious list of the best this-or-that.
    John Mariani, Forbes, 20 Feb. 2023
  • Ah, yes, the rock star, the species (and often specious) petra stella, in the Latin.
    Chris Jones, chicagotribune.com, 6 Apr. 2018
  • The claim that the merger will create more jobs is even more specious.
    Gigi Sohn, WIRED, 10 May 2018
  • There’s a specious equivocation we were sold for 50 to 60 years of the drug war.
    John Wenzel, The Know, 24 Mar. 2017
  • Jones’ complaints about how the city treated him are specious.
    Lauren Ritchie, OrlandoSentinel.com, 18 June 2018
  • Those specious bits of news found a home on mailers sent to Cleveland voters.
    cleveland, 12 Sep. 2021
  • But that hasn’t stopped people from making specious claims.
    Tara Parker-Pope, New York Times, 10 Mar. 2020
  • As ought to be well known by now, claims of mass voter fraud are specious always and everywhere.
    Osita Nwanevu, The New Republic, 13 May 2021
  • As is invariably the case with the work of deficit hawks, Manchin’s concerns are entirely specious.
    Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 3 Sep. 2021
  • To most clubs and their fans, such internal conflict might seem specious.
    Sam Borden, New York Times, 11 May 2016
  • All that said, even specious arguments can have some basis in fact, and there are ways that ESG needs to mature.
    Aron Cramer, Fortune, 20 Sep. 2021
  • That charge is specious, and the U.S. should refute it vigorously.
    Michael Doran and, WSJ, 17 June 2018
  • As this team continues to receive specious praise as the best offense in the history of the league, how many players had career years from the 3-point line?
    Tim Cowlishaw, Dallas News, 31 Aug. 2020
  • In April, cops in Georgia pulled over a busload of mostly Black college athletes for the most specious of reasons.
    Paul Daugherty, The Enquirer, 11 May 2022
  • That’s a specious argument, in my view, because the two go together.
    Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker, 18 Dec. 2019
  • But the second claim — that a party with a nonwhite base is doomed to low turnout in off-year elections — is looking mighty specious this morning.
    Eric Levitz, Daily Intelligencer, 13 Dec. 2017
  • Any complaint about my behavior, no matter how specious, could be a mark against my record.
    Oliver Bateman, The Atlantic, 10 May 2017
  • Not the least of Price’s achievement is to rescue Viking history from the grasp of white supremacists who claim a specious lineage with it.
    The New Yorker, 1 Dec. 2020
  • His goal that day in June 2018: publicize the specious beliefs held by followers of the QAnon theory.
    AZCentral.com, 1 Oct. 2020
  • To argue there is no connection to the historic issue is specious and silly.
    Victoria Kim, Los Angeles Times, 21 July 2019
  • When asked, Biden agreed that the filibuster has a specious history attached to the Jim Crow era and segregation.
    Washington Post, 25 Mar. 2021
  • Not a press release about a new chef or restaurant comes across my desk these days that does not use the locavore or farm-to-table boast, even when largely specious.
    John Mariani, Esquire, 24 May 2011
  • The lesson the Barack Obama era should have taught us is the foundational faultiness of specious claims to a post-racial America.
    Time, 16 Jan. 2020
  • In the ensuing months, Giuliani appears to have functioned as a conduit for specious claims that made their way to Trump and right-wing media outlets.
    Author: Greg Miller, Greg Jaffe, Paul Sonne, Anchorage Daily News, 13 Apr. 2016
  • NFTs reflect a view of the world in which anything can be monetized, even if its value is entirely specious.
    Jacob Silverman, The New Republic, 10 Mar. 2021
  • Will this picture seek to nudge us in the direction of feel-good bipartisan healing — a goal that seems elusive at best and specious at worst?
    Tribune News Service, cleveland, 11 Nov. 2020
  • So the idea that all of a sudden the introduction of slow downloads entirely cratered an industry is to me specious.
    The Politics Of Everything, The New Republic, 27 May 2021
  • Campaign rallies have been chock-full of specious claims and fan-fiction narratives.
    Peter Baker, New York Times, 1 Nov. 2020
  • The Atlantic would no doubt exploit Marvin Gaye and produce the same specious result: Black pop as a decoy for elitist power.
    Armond White, National Review, 30 Sep. 2020

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