How to Use weakling in a Sentence

weakling

noun
Definition of weaklingnext
Synonyms for weaklingnext
  • In nature, a lame duck is a weakling, a bird that can’t keep up with the flock and is easy pickings for predators.
    — Oliver Staley, Quartz, 7 Nov. 2020
  • The next weakling Minnesota will face is Maryland, a team that has lost four of five and slid into the abyss.
    — Rainer Sabin, Detroit Free Press, 25 Oct. 2019
  • Experts say the storm may be slow-moving but is hardly a weakling.
    — Daniel Cusick, Scientific American, 16 Sep. 2020
  • But one thing is certain: The U.S. central bank has become a weakling.
    — Washington Post, 19 Sep. 2019
  • The Hawkeyes continued to use that combo to beat up on the conference’s weaklings.
    — Rainer Sabin, Detroit Free Press, 28 Oct. 2019
  • Europe increasingly looks like a 120-pound weakling that can’t keep the lights on.
    — Kenneth Rapoza, Forbes, 17 Aug. 2022
  • Against a backdrop of a slowing growth elsewhere, Greece is far from the weakling of Europe that was on the brink of bankruptcy just a few years ago.
    — Stelios Bouras, Fortune, 26 Feb. 2020
  • The script, alas, is a bit of a 98-pound weakling, but given the escapist demands probably sufficient to get the job done.
    — Brian Lowry, CNN, 15 July 2022
  • Neither of these big guys is a weakling opponent imported from out of town to make the local kid look good.
    — Don Steinberg, Philly.com, 26 Apr. 2018
  • Yeah, that’s not going to happen, but the Warriors have at least a chance of improving their 90-pound-weakling image.
    — Scott Ostler, San Francisco Chronicle, 15 Aug. 2021
  • The first two were over the weakling Giants and Redskins, but manhandling the contending Raiders should make folks take notice.
    — Barry Wilner, chicagotribune.com, 25 Nov. 2019
  • Australia is here because of that and regarded as a tournament weakling, though the team earned some credit in a courageous 2-1 defeat to France.
    — Martin Rogers, USA TODAY, 19 June 2018
  • At first, Daryl finds himself on the wrong side of that privileged weakling weasel, otherwise known as Sebastian, son of Pamela Milton, who runs this town.
    — Nick Romano, EW.com, 28 Feb. 2022
  • Coming off an historically bad year and a series of miserable starts, the Twins, for one day at least, morphed from 98-pound weaklings to heroes of the beach.
    — Tom Powers, Twin Cities, 3 Apr. 2017
  • Such incidents have given it a reputation as the tech weakling of Japan’s megabanks.
    — Washington Post, 11 Mar. 2019
  • Paul Hebron as father James, ruined by success, terrified of poverty, is both a brilliant man and a weakling.
    — John Timpane, Philly.com, 12 Oct. 2017
  • Sitting in the back of the classroom full of kids a quarter his age, Jay kvetches about how Odysseus is a lying adulterer, Telemachus an obedient weakling, and Homer simply wrong about love, war and justice.
    — Giancarlo Buonomo, New Republic, 3 Oct. 2017
  • In his first film role, Bathily (whose father grew up in the eponymous housing complex) was an unlikely choice; the part of Youri would seem to require a nerdy, 98-pound weakling, staring passively at the stars.
    — Washington Post, 28 Mar. 2022
  • In the aftermath of the killing, Mr. Chun instigated a coup against Park’s weakling successor and began a reign of absolute power and terror.
    — Washington Post, 23 Nov. 2021
  • My little weakling account (@rjallain) just has over 500 followers (notice no K).
    — Rhett Allain, WIRED, 17 May 2011
  • In this view, Facebook is a naive weakling afraid to take any enforcement action on its platform; Apple, on the other hand, is the practical one who never pretended to embrace free speech in the first place.
    — Casey Newton, The Verge, 8 Aug. 2018
  • In trying to repeat the trick, Trump is already portraying some elected Democrats as extremist and anti-American—and the rest as weaklings who are in hock to the extremist anti-Americans.
    — John Cassidy, The New Yorker, 3 Aug. 2019
  • By all accounts, Dorian started out as a hurricane weakling.
    — Wired, 4 Sep. 2019
  • Ostensibly about an emerging health crisis, the show is really the cable news equivalent of that comic book advertisement for Charles Atlas where the 98-lb weakling gets sand kicked in his face.
    — Timothy Caulfield, Men's Health, 21 Nov. 2022
  • Criticizing Biden for not establishing a no-fly zone is a more specific charge than simply calling him a weakling—a tangible thing that the president could be doing in Ukraine but isn’t.
    — Alex Shephard, The New Republic, 15 Mar. 2022
  • And the surrender or war over Korea that may follow will be but one part, however distressing or bloody, of the price this country will pay for a government administered by moral weaklings and lickspittles.
    — Eliot A. Cohen, The Atlantic, 2 Oct. 2017
  • On the other side, Ukraine is a relative weakling in cyberspace that has become the first country to fight back against an invader by publicly calling up an international army of vigilante hackers.
    — Christopher Mims, WSJ, 5 Mar. 2022
  • The following month, after suffering complications from surgery, the man who’d plucked Chrysler from liquidation, merged it with Fiat and guided both weaklings to profitability, died at age 66.
    — Sam Walker, WSJ, 11 Aug. 2018
  • Were Harry and Meghan millennial weaklings retreating into self-care and self-pity, unwilling to withstand the scrutiny of their public life in exchange for the material luxury of their private one?
    — Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker, 13 Apr. 2020
  • At other times, Trump has contradicted his own administration’s policy, expressing a willingness to talk with Maduro and dismissing Guaidó as a weakling.
    — Washington Post, 20 Aug. 2020

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