How to Use dog whistle in a Sentence

dog whistle

noun
Definition of dog whistlenext
  • The dog whistle comes from the top, and the middle and lower levels act on it.
    — Jina Moore, New York Times, 30 Oct. 2017
  • McAuliffe calls the GOP focus on the matter a racist dog whistle.
    — Boris Sanchez, CNN, 15 Oct. 2021
  • The comments Otis makes on his blog aren’t racist dog whistles.
    — Anne Branigin, The Root, 3 Mar. 2018
  • These students think, or have been taught to think, that free speech is just a dog whistle for the alt-right.
    — Daniel Henninger, WSJ, 11 Oct. 2017
  • Monday was not the first time Jiang addressed dog whistles at the White House.
    — Tanya A. Christian, Essence, 12 May 2020
  • But think about the dog whistle that in some instances has been far louder.
    — NBC News, 29 Nov. 2020
  • As a teen, Rhinehart could hear sounds like dog whistles when no one else could.
    — Yessenia Funes, Curbed, 11 Aug. 2023
  • Even in 1968, though, Wallace’s dog whistle couldn’t win him any states outside the South.
    — Timothy Noah, The New Republic, 24 Aug. 2020
  • First off, there is no racist dog whistle in this tweet, since Donald Trump didn’t use all caps.
    — Stephen A. Crockett Jr., The Root, 29 Mar. 2018
  • For decades, America has relied on subtext and dog whistle, and in all that time the sphinx has laid waste to us.
    — Colin Dickey, Longreads, 31 Aug. 2017
  • There’s a school of thought that believes that every instrument that makes a sound is a dog whistle.
    — Rich Lowry, National Review, 8 May 2023
  • Well, with the election of Donald Trump as the leader of their party, the dog whistles have been replaced by a megaphone.
    — Alaska Dispatch News, 20 Aug. 2017
  • One of them uses a word that is on its face offensive, and the other one uses sort of a racist dog whistle.
    — Stephanie Ebbert, BostonGlobe.com, 1 June 2018
  • But Nehlen takes Trump’s dog whistling to anti-Semites and white supremacists to a new level.
    — Tara Golshan, Vox, 12 Apr. 2018
  • Anti-Raider supporters claimed the R was a pro-Raider symbol, like a racist dog whistle.
    — New York Times, 30 June 2021
  • To be serious for a moment, what Trump tweeted wasn’t a dog whistle.
    — Kevin Cullen, BostonGlobe.com, 17 July 2019
  • The dog whistle glossary updates every five years or so.
    — Damon Young, Washington Post, 26 Sep. 2022
  • And now, the Trump hat is sometimes a dog whistle of barbaric white supremacy, and that is a massive problem.
    — Lincoln Anthony Blades, Teen Vogue, 16 Feb. 2018
  • Along with this was the racist dog whistles the Republicans persist in blowing.
    — Alaska Dispatch News, 20 Aug. 2017
  • For the chief law enforcement officer to use a dog whistle like that is appalling.
    — Jessica Estepa, USA TODAY, 13 Feb. 2018
  • This is a race where the pundits said that Youngkin was blowing the racial dog whistle and trying to get Whites and White supremacists engaged in the race.
    — Fox News Staff, Fox News, 3 Nov. 2021
  • Everyone who didn’t vote for this man knows that a presidential all-caps tweet is the highest pitch of his racist dog whistle.
    — Stephen A. Crockett Jr., The Root, 28 Mar. 2018
  • In its paper-thin hypocrisy, his video epistle Was a minute-long rendition of his usual dog whistle.
    — John Lithgow, The New Yorker, 27 Sep. 2021
  • Trump's Juneteenth Tulsa rally might have been a mistake — or a racist dog whistle, Joshua Adams writes in an opinion piece.
    — NBC News, 18 June 2020
  • Fear is creeping in that instead of beginning to beat back the tide of Trumpism and race-baiting dog whistles, Democrats will once again be submerged in it.
    — Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, 11 Oct. 2017
  • In fact, tensions did reach a boiling point over a scene in the third Roseanne-reboot episode that seemed to dismiss those very ABC shows, and was hard to read as anything but a racist dog whistle.
    — Joy Press, HWD, 29 May 2018
  • First, here is a piece exploring the dangerous rise of racist dog whistles in modern media.
    — Ellen McGirt, Fortune, 31 May 2018
  • But what Trump has done is given a green light, a dog whistle to those who would rewrite history, who would use that history as a tool.
    — Griff Witte, Washington Post, 19 Feb. 2018
  • His latest false birther claims to Baier are another racist dog whistle in a history of such language.
    — Sarah Beth Hensley, ABC News, 22 Jan. 2024
  • This is hardly the first time Musk has interacted with and posted dog whistles to the QAnon community.
    — David Gilbert, WIRED, 28 Nov. 2023

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