How to Use bogeyman in a Sentence

bogeyman

noun
  • The fact is that Amazon is the bogeyman that can come at you in three to five years.
    — Laura Stevens, WSJ, 1 June 2018
  • And the foreign bogeyman was no longer the driver.
    — Sarah D. Wire, USA Today, 23 Mar. 2026
  • But the bogeyman of mass unemployment is still nowhere in sight.
    — Jeremy Kahn, Fortune, 13 Feb. 2024
  • Missing work overwhelm is the high school version of the bogeyman.
    — Cyndy Etler, Hartford Courant, 12 May 2025
  • By their lights, one of this bogeyman’s hallmarks is its amnesia.
    — Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post, 28 July 2023
  • For years, carbon dioxide has been the bogeyman of climate change, and rightly so.
    — Tianyi Sun, CNN, 20 Oct. 2022
  • That menace is a favorite bogeyman for deficit hawks in Congress.
    — Shawn Tully, Fortune, 16 Feb. 2018
  • This becomes the bogeyman that haunts her after the tragic failure of the science project.
    — Bill Desowitz, IndieWire, 22 July 2024
  • Nonetheless, Quill has become a bogeyman of politicians on the left and right.
    — The Editorial Board, WSJ, 15 Mar. 2018
  • Justin Baldoni would seem to be a bogeyman for America’s right wing.
    — Gary Baum, The Hollywood Reporter, 24 Jan. 2025
  • In recent days, a new bogeyman emerged in the form of a trio of bank failures and the chilling specter of a financial crisis.
    — Alicia Wallace, CNN, 15 Mar. 2023
  • For all of his brutality and bogeyman power, viewers didn’t think of him as a villain.
    — Brian Raftery, Longreads, 29 Jan. 2026
  • The federal budget deficit was for years a bogeyman for business leaders and politicians alike.
    — Nicolas Rapp, Fortune, 26 Oct. 2017
  • Some use the idea as a bogeyman to scare up regulation, while others brandish it in marketing.
    — Matthew Hutson, IEEE Spectrum, 7 May 2026
  • If there was a bogeyman of the corporate world that can't be ignored, then leadership takes the pole position.
    — Thomas "ai Nerd" Helfrich, Forbes, 28 Dec. 2021
  • Among Hollywood’s creative class, AI is a sort of bogeyman right now.
    — Emma Hinchliffe, Fortune, 10 Dec. 2025
  • California is still up there, but Illinois could emerge as the new bogeyman for natives trying to keep out-of-staters at bay.
    — Aldo Svaldi, The Denver Post, 15 Nov. 2019
  • Biden, the Democrats, and the liberal culture have been unable to transform him into a bogeyman.
    — Matthew Continetti, National Review, 3 June 2023
  • Donald Whitfield might be the man who owns the lien, but the real bogeyman here is the federal government.
    — Amanda Whiting, Vulture, 23 Feb. 2025
  • All the while, a bogeyman served him well—not a return to communism, Yeltsin’s scarecrow, but the chaos of Yeltsinism.
    — Stephen Kotkin, Foreign Affairs, 1 Mar. 2015
  • The Koch network has been a bogeyman on the left and its backing in a primary may not be as helpful as Koch strategists hope.
    — Philip Elliott, Time, 7 June 2019
  • Onstage, at least, people rarely want their bogeymen to sound like Ron DeSantis.
    — Zach Helfand, The New Yorker, 25 Sep. 2023
  • King’s monsters will remind you of vampires and bogeymen and some of his villains aren’t too far off from sounding like the Devil himself.
    — Gina Vaynshteyn, refinery29.com, 12 Jan. 2020
  • Musk has become a bogeyman for Democrats, who say his cuts to government are slipshod and putting Americans at risk.
    — Tara Suter, The Hill, 19 Mar. 2025
  • Lately, of course, this niche legal movement has found itself at the center of the culture wars, as a new bogeyman of the political right.
    — Lauren Michele Jackson, The New Yorker, 27 July 2021
  • Jamie Lee Curtis returns for a final battle with the bogeyman, but can anything kill this franchise?
    — A.a. Dowd, Chron, 13 Oct. 2022
  • Scott seems almost wistful now to recall the Nineties, when the bogeyman in America was crack cocaine.
    — Paul Solotaroff, Rolling Stone, 30 Jan. 2022
  • For all that Chapman has accomplished this season, the postseason has loomed as his career-long bogeyman.
    — Jen McCaffrey, New York Times, 30 Sep. 2025
  • Trump, of course, ignored it and turned Hispanics and Muslims into the bogeymen of his campaign.
    — Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker, 24 Feb. 2017
  • That’s a hyperpop bogeyman as potent as the yuppie was for hardcore punk, or as the senator’s son was for the Woodstock crowd.
    — Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic, 14 Feb. 2021

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