How to Use basket case in a Sentence

basket case

noun
  • I was so worried about losing my job that I was a complete basket case.
  • Let’s face the truth – Germany is supposed to be a basket case in decline.
    — Clem Chambers, Forbes.com, 18 May 2026
  • There was a Queen Bee, a loudmouth, a nerd, a jock, and more than a few basket cases.
    — Literary Hub, 11 June 2026
  • In the economic basket case that is Venezuela, these are the hot new consumer products.
    — Patricia Laya, Bloomberg.com, 8 Dec. 2017
  • Illinois is a fiscal basket case, so no new resources are forthcoming.
    — Gary MacDougal, WSJ, 8 Aug. 2018
  • Europe, long the basket case of the world economy, is now a leader in expansion.
    — Peter S. Goodman, New York Times, 22 Jan. 2018
  • In four decades, China went from a backward basket case to the second-largest economy on the planet.
    — Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 17 Oct. 2019
  • And there are plenty of replacements for a word like basket case, another good one to consider avoiding.
    — Katy Steinmetz, Time, 26 Apr. 2018
  • Venezuela is an economic basket case, thanks to 25 years of the socialism embraced by so many Democrats.
    — Merrill Matthews, Washington Post, 7 Jan. 2026
  • Institutional failure isn’t enough by itself to create a basket case, though.
    — James MacKintosh, WSJ, 14 Aug. 2018
  • How Governor Polis turned one of the country's strongest state economies into a basket case.
    — Ben Murrey, National Review, 2 July 2021
  • The video, posted on New Year’s Day, stars the brain, the athlete, the basket case, the princess and the criminal.
    — Lisa Gutierrez, Kansas City Star, 5 Jan. 2026
  • Venezuela, once among the hemisphere’s richest countries and boasting the world’s largest crude reserves, has turned into the regional basket case.
    — Jim Wyss and Cody Weddle, miamiherald, 16 May 2018
  • My grandfather bought it as a basket case before passing away unexpectedly.
    — Casey Williams, chicagotribune.com, 3 July 2018
  • Poor Hunter is a basket case, whose last run-in with the police was as recent as 2017 and who was kicked out of the Navy for drug abuse.
    — Nr Editors, National Review, 24 Oct. 2019
  • Almost everywhere in the world – even in economic basket cases such as Brazil and Russia – growth is picking up.
    — Laurent Belsie, The Christian Science Monitor, 21 Oct. 2017
  • The island nation of 11 million is a political and economic basket case.
    — Andrew Stuttaford, National Review, 23 July 2021
  • However, the warning signs were ignored, and that’s why EDD is now an operational basket case.
    — Dan Walters, SFChronicle.com, 22 Oct. 2020
  • His main accomplishment was to transform the country by giving us Joe Biden who then transformed the country into a basket case.
    — Peter Lucas, Boston Herald, 16 Oct. 2025
  • His salary was outlandish by Japanese standards, but his greatest sin was making the firm into a corporate governance basket case.
    — Jeff Kingston For Cnn Business Perspectives, CNN, 17 Jan. 2020
  • Far from being a basket case, Russia enters the crisis with bulging financial reserves, its big companies nearly free of debt and all but self-sufficient in agriculture.
    — Andrew E. Kramer, New York Times, 20 Mar. 2020
  • Illinois is the nation’s leading fiscal basket case, with runaway pension liabilities and public-union control of Springfield.
    — Andrew Stuttaford, National Review, 6 Oct. 2020
  • Productivity plummeted — production of corn, Zimbabwe’s main staple, fell by two-thirds — and the country swung from being a net food exporter to a basket case within a few years.
    — Glenn Frankel, Washington Post, 6 Sep. 2019
  • Ortega modeled his revolution on Cuba, which by then had clearly become a totalitarian basket case.
    — Steven Greenhut, Oc Register, 17 Apr. 2026
  • Tottenham, meanwhile, is in seventh place and literally fired its manager on Monday; Arsenal, a basket case, is in tenth, and appears to be in the midst of a rebuild that will take years.
    — Alex Shephard, The New Republic, 20 Apr. 2021
  • Particularly vulnerable are those paying higher local income taxes, most of them living in and around the big coastal metros and the Midwest’s new basket case, Chicago.
    — Joel Kotkin, National Review, 12 Dec. 2017
  • More importantly, the difference between becoming a success story like T-Mobile and a basket case like Sprint isn’t just network quality.
    — Washington Post, 29 July 2019
  • America has become a fiscal basket case, and neither party is offering any kind of serious solution for a disaster that is already contributing to brutal inflation and may one day crush the value of the dollar.
    — Chris Stirewalt, The Hill, 31 Oct. 2025
  • For the past decade, international economists and ratings agencies have been blaming Italy’s gigantic debt load for making the nation the most worrisome basket case among Europe’s major economies.
    — Shawn Tully, Fortune, 14 Jan. 2021
  • The next 12 months will decide whether Sunderland are indeed the basket case to which they have been portrayed, or made of similar ilk to the Rokermen who inspired years of relative success 31 years ago.
    — SI.com, 23 Apr. 2018

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