How to Use thug in a Sentence

thug

noun
  • He was beaten and robbed by street thugs.
  • The street thugs, the drugs, the knives and the guns, are alien to him.
    Baz Bamigboye, Deadline, 28 June 2024
  • But in brushing aside the clerk, the thug put the clerk behind him.
    David J. Neal, miamiherald, 4 Feb. 2018
  • He could have been attacked by the same thugs who robbed and roughed up the man in the road.
    Vincent Kituku, idahostatesman, 23 Mar. 2018
  • The capo wants to know why his thugs are lying dead in the hallway.
    David Fear, Rolling Stone, 30 Aug. 2023
  • Yes, some of the thugs were displaying the flag with the swastika on it.
    Alaska Dispatch News, 16 Aug. 2017
  • Kennedy was not used to dealing with a thug like Khrushchev.
    Eli Stokols, latimes.com, 9 June 2018
  • The truck isn’t fixed, but Walt is confronted by the judge’s thugs.
    Sandra Dallas, The Denver Post, 7 June 2024
  • At two o’clock in the morning, the hooded thugs would come burn a cross on our hill.
    Roy S. Johnson | Rjohnson@al.com, al, 27 July 2023
  • But he was supposed to look like a big thug, like muscle for the mob.
    Andy Greene, Rolling Stone, 7 Mar. 2022
  • But for weeks, he was painted as a brute and a thug in the trial of the three White men who killed him.
    Nicole Chavez, CNN, 25 Nov. 2021
  • The band moved out when a street thug used an ax to break down the wall and steal all their instruments.
    Pam Kragen, San Diego Union-Tribune, 13 Oct. 2019
  • Local thug, Dodger, has been trying to take down the center from the start.
    Carolyn Twersky, Seventeen, 21 Nov. 2019
  • Mike was bleeding to death by the side of the road, too, after being stabbed by some thugs.
    David Segal, New York Times, 23 Mar. 2020
  • Now, those thugs are convinced Joe knows where the loot is hidden.
    Time, 30 June 2023
  • And yes, Ryan is within his rights to tell Gianforte, the thug, to pound sand.
    Charles P. Pierce, Esquire, 25 May 2017
  • In all that time, none of his co-workers figured out that Shaw was a racist thug?
    Joseph Gerth, The Courier-Journal, 22 Jan. 2018
  • Make no mistake – Maduro and his gang of thugs pose a problem for the entire world.
    Orlando Sentinel, OrlandoSentinel.com, 9 Jan. 2018
  • But what bothers me about this is, don't take the side of a thug who kills his opponents.
    CBS News, 11 Feb. 2024
  • Last June, Aunt Maggie got out of her car in the church parking lot and was knocked down by an armed thug.
    Larry Elder, Orange County Register, 15 Feb. 2024
  • The use of the word thug is a part of that history and continuum.
    Safia Samee Ali, NBC News, 27 Sep. 2020
  • These are good young men who have been portrayed as thugs by virtue of this lawsuit.
    Christy Gutowski, chicagotribune.com, 16 Mar. 2018
  • If that was a scene from a movie, that thug isn’t going to explain himself.
    vanityfair.com, 27 June 2017
  • Lemons explained, citing the default stereotypes of the gangster and the thug.
    Laura Regensdorf, Vogue, 26 June 2017
  • Our bus [was] surrounded at a rest stop on the Mason-Dixon Line by a White mob, thugs.
    Clarence Williams, Washington Post, 25 Aug. 2023
  • Instead, the figure comes crashing through the window, like some thug in a cop thriller.
    Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 6 July 2023
  • But his end is lots of churches, lots of thugs, lots of killings, lots of madness going on on that side.
    Mankaprr Conteh, Rolling Stone, 21 June 2024
  • Most people will not watch A Clockwork Orange and leave the theater a rapist or a killer or a thug.
    Erik Kain, Forbes, 4 Oct. 2021
  • And there are also old-school mobsters, henchmen and thugs.
    Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times, 31 July 2024
  • There’s never any real sense of danger to the proceedings, even once a pair of gun-toting thugs (Jim Kitson and Amaury Nolasco) turn up in the town.
    Angie Han, The Hollywood Reporter, 25 June 2024

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