How to Use ballpoint pen in a Sentence

ballpoint pen

noun
  • Who knew a ballpoint pen could be used in a fight to the death?
    — Marc Bona, cleveland, 22 Dec. 2022
  • My script was just white with black type and hardly any ballpoint pen.
    — Bilge Ebiri, Vulture, 23 July 2021
  • The cooling device is a thin tube as long as a ballpoint pen.
    — Jordan Wilkerson, Dallas News, 23 Jan. 2020
  • Cobain left behind a note written in a red ballpoint pen.
    — Nicole Briese, PEOPLE, 8 Apr. 2026
  • My weak, tingling hand could barely hold a cheap ballpoint pen.
    — Longreads, 4 Mar. 2020
  • Some of the positions are rendered in what looks like ballpoint pen.
    — Anna Russell, The New Yorker, 10 Oct. 2022
  • On the back of each block, draw the outline of a dreidel with a ballpoint pen, pressing hard.
    — Janna Oberdorf, Parents, 15 Dec. 2025
  • Voters are encouraged to bring their own black ballpoint pen.
    — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 31 Mar. 2020
  • Petro points to a fresh track in the dirt, a paw print measuring nearly the length of a ballpoint pen.
    — Christina Larson, San Diego Union-Tribune, 7 Oct. 2019
  • Diners are still given a ballpoint pen to mark their selections on the menu.
    — Michael Bauer, San Francisco Chronicle, 14 Mar. 2018
  • With a ballpoint pen, one presses the tip to the paper and the ink simply rolls out onto the fibers.
    — New Atlas, 29 Oct. 2025
  • That said, this pen is a ballpoint pen instead of a gel pen, so the ink is not quite as durable and can bleed through some papers.
    — Sherri Gordon, Verywell Health, 21 July 2023
  • And also, watching the game with a ballpoint pen in hand to do my best to practice on timing when to ring in.
    — Tyler Aquilina, EW.com, 27 Jan. 2022
  • Enter the humble ballpoint pen.
    — Iona Brannon, Travel + Leisure, 18 Oct. 2025
  • The state also sent more than one million ballpoint pens so voters can use their own pens to sign the poll book and mark a ballot.
    — Nick Corasaniti, New York Times, 2 Apr. 2020
  • Print out your house numbers in an attractive font, then trace them onto your pumpkin with a ballpoint pen.
    — Maria Sabella, Better Homes & Gardens, 15 Sep. 2025
  • The slim knife carries an even slimmer ballpoint pen cartridge that hides away near the rounded tip of the handle.
    — New Atlas, 26 Mar. 2026
  • His pictures from that time are in blue ballpoint pen on pieces of paper torn out of notebooks — that’s all Kostenko had.
    — Mike Corder, USA TODAY, 19 Aug. 2023
  • More than 1 million black ballpoint pens are being distributed so that each voter can have their own pen.
    — Ryan Teague Beckwith, Bloomberg.com, 10 May 2020
  • Into the catheter, a surgeon injected a steel bead slightly larger than the ball of a ballpoint pen.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 25 Sep. 2012
  • Rossi boops their snoots with a clicky ballpoint pen, and the fish—which are amphibious, and can survive on land for weeks at a time—backflip out of reach.
    — Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic, 15 June 2021
  • What inspired Yoakum to put colored pencil and ballpoint pen to paper at the age of seventy-one?
    — Andrea K. Scott, The New Yorker, 28 Jan. 2022
  • On the first and second attempts, his secret voice recorder, disguised to look like a ballpoint pen left on a table, was picked up by somebody else.
    — Corin Cesaric, Peoplemag, 28 July 2023
  • When an actor charms the pants off us, nothing, especially a writer with a ballpoint pen and bad hair, can persuade us to put them back on.
    — Anthony Lane, New Yorker, 18 Sep. 2025
  • Chips in a cell phone are an example of core technology components, just like engines in a plane — or the ball in a ballpoint pen.
    — Ling Chen, Washington Post, 25 June 2018
  • Think of the zipper, the ballpoint pen or the paper clip — items designed out of frustration with the existing order.
    — cleveland, 22 Feb. 2020
  • Those ballots came in from voters marked in blue ballpoint pen, with check marks, x marks and other ambiguous marks rather than the oval bubble being filled in.
    — Sasha Hupka, The Arizona Republic, 14 Nov. 2022
  • The selfie shows the 13-year-old with his hair braided, staring at the camera wide-eyed as his dad tries to take his braids out with the help of a ballpoint pen.
    — Angela Andaloro, Peoplemag, 17 June 2023
  • The most frequent material Medalla employed over the course of half a century seems to have been ballpoint pen.
    — Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times, 27 June 2024
  • And when an assassin with a machine gun crashes into his apartment, a weaponless Bourne knows how to subdue the guy with a ballpoint pen.
    — Leah Greenblatt, EW.com, 15 June 2022

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