How to Use cheap in a Sentence

cheap

1 of 2 adjective
  • This gas station is cheaper than the one by the highway.
  • He wears a cheap watch that's always breaking.
  • Don't be cheap—buy good quality tires for your car.
  • I always buy the cheapest brand of cereal.
  • Democrats like cheap drugs, too.
    — Britta Miller, The Washington Examiner, 22 Apr. 2026
  • This project will not be cheap.
    — Ben Guttmann, New York Daily News, 15 Mar. 2026
  • There’s more to this than cheap rent.
    — Sean Joseph Outkick, FOXNews.com, 29 Apr. 2026
  • Your dad gets a pair of cheap seats.
    — Matthew Shen Goodman, Harpers Magazine, 19 Sep. 2025
  • Jim says both of these stocks are cheap.
    — Paulina Likos, CNBC, 22 Oct. 2025
  • And those folks aren’t known to be cheap hires.
    — Andrew Nusca, Fortune, 21 Apr. 2026
  • Fast food was rare, and even then, not cheap.
    — Bob Rommel, Sun Sentinel, 30 Mar. 2026
  • With great food and cheap drinks, what's not to love?
    — Becky Bartkowski, AZCentral.com, 14 Feb. 2026
  • These tools are fast enough and cheap enough to scale now.
    — Francesca Pezzoli, Forbes.com, 11 Sep. 2025
  • Things are a lot cheaper out here.
    — Celia Fernandez raffi Paul, CNBC, 18 Sep. 2025
  • Now, the era of cheap fakes is ending.
    — Nadav Ziv, Time, 23 Oct. 2025
  • But the new normal isn’t cheap.
    — Sean Keeler, Denver Post, 31 Aug. 2025
  • The apartment is great and the rent is cheap.
    — Sean Joseph Outkick, FOXNews.com, 29 Apr. 2026
  • In other words, the cheap seats.
    — Dalila Muata, NBC news, 5 May 2026
  • Wynwood hasn’t been cheap for a long time.
    — Sarah Moreno, Miami Herald, 27 Apr. 2026
  • That's the cheap end of the challenge, too.
    — R.j. Coyle, Dallas Morning News, 6 Apr. 2026
  • And that stuff's being brought in and it's raised cheap.
    — Dan Morrison, USA Today, 7 Nov. 2025
  • That said, shrimp is still cheaper per pound than beef.
    — Nick Lichtenberg, Fortune, 6 Feb. 2026
  • Shares may not be cheap, but there’s a reason for that.
    — Kevin Stankiewicz,morgan Chittum, CNBC, 18 Sep. 2025
  • This year, beads are back, but not the cheap plastic ones.
    — Stephen Smith, Chicago Tribune, 16 Feb. 2026
  • These days there is nothing cheap about the meats the shop sells.
    — John Ramos, CBS News, 13 May 2026
  • Still, life in Bethesda doesn’t come cheap.
    — Lydia Mansel, Travel + Leisure, 27 Apr. 2026
  • Why not just grab the cheapest bottle on the store shelf?
    — Katie Decker-Jacoby, StyleCaster, 29 Apr. 2026
  • When is the cheapest time to fly this summer?
    — Kathleen Wong, USA Today, 28 Apr. 2026
  • Why are we drawn to the second-cheapest glass?
    — Emily Saladino, Washington Post, 21 Feb. 2026
  • But in an ideal world, should ticket prices be cheap?
    — Stefan Szymanski, The Conversation, 10 June 2026

cheap

2 of 2 adverb
  • But flying cheap doesn’t matter much if there isn’t anywhere good to fly.
    — Alexandra Skores, Dallas News, 13 Apr. 2023
  • This lifts an overhang from a deeply out-of-favor and cheap-seeming group.
    — Michael Santoli, CNBC, 30 Sep. 2025
  • This one is on the $260 million worth of players who came up cheap.
    — Los Angeles Times, 19 Oct. 2022
  • There are some rough edges, such as the cheap-feeling steering wheel stalks and some of the other switchgear.
    — James Morris, Forbes, 5 June 2021
  • Johnny Bright, a star at Drake, was cheap-shotted over his race and his talent.
    — Globe Staff, BostonGlobe.com, 23 July 2022
  • Normal people just find the whole brand overhaul ugly and dreary and cheap-looking.
    — Rebecca Alter, Vulture, 22 Aug. 2025
  • The stock is trading cheap compared with its historical levels, said Chamoun.
    — Hakyung Kim, CNBC, 10 Dec. 2024
  • Waititi has infused the film with the same cheesy, cheap-looking aesthetic that gave his previous films such low-key charm.
    — Ann Hornaday, Washington Post, 5 July 2022
  • Lemieux was on the ice to hoist it, receiving only a two-game suspension for cheap-shotting Draper.
    — Viv Bernstein, Detroit Free Press, 29 May 2021
  • Overly shiny or the wrong shade of gold or silver metals can steer the accessory in a cheap-looking direction.
    — Nicole Kliest, Vogue, 13 Mar. 2022
  • The tree was usually found on land that had been given away or sold cheap by the federal government—and then had to be repurchased at very high cost.
    — Verlyn Klinkenborg, The New York Review of Books, 2 Mar. 2023
  • Critics called the finish cheap, staged and anticlimactic.
    — Bobby Burack Outkick, FOXNews.com, 18 May 2026
  • The rent started out cheap and then dropped off to nothing after the landlord’s demise, when ownership of the property fell into legal limbo.
    — al, 25 June 2020
  • The Goldpro comes with a travel bag, concentrator nozzle and very cheap-looking plastic travel brush.
    — Lesley Kennedy, CNN Underscored, 20 Jan. 2021
  • Wall Street complains because higher rates add risk to otherwise painless ways to make gobs of money by borrowing cheap and lending long.
    — Scott Burns, Dallas News, 29 Aug. 2023
  • What Cowboy Bebop is, down to its hammy cyberpunk signage and the nails of its cheap-looking sets, is a performance.
    — Cecilia D'anastasio, Wired, 19 Nov. 2021
  • However, the company has made the Classicolor film pretty cheap too, at around $11 a roll.
    — New Atlas, 1 Apr. 2026
  • Musk ultimately wants to make space travel cheap enough that even Average Joes can access the cosmos—or Mars.
    — Lauren Sigfusson, Discover Magazine, 20 Feb. 2018
  • The firm and a whole host of other renters spent millions adding Tesla and Polestar models to their fleets, only to start selling them off cheap when the problems started mounting.
    — Owen Bellwood / Jalopnik, Quartz, 16 July 2024
  • But some of the interiors seem to belong to another house, like a cheap-looking finished basement with canary-yellow walls and a bathroom with, oddly, a urinal.
    — Adriane Quinlan, Curbed, 28 Oct. 2025
  • This made borrowing money cheap and incentivized investors such as venture capitalists to deploy more money and into riskier assets.
    — Ernestine Siu, CNBC, 23 Feb. 2025
  • Keychron also used a new type of stabilizer that screws into the PCB, and there was no cheap-sounding plastic rattle among the keys when using stabilizers.
    — Scharon Harding, Ars Technica, 29 Jan. 2022
  • As with drones, militants used cheap, often off-the-shelf materials to build weapons that exploited a Pentagon vulnerability.
    — Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY, 29 Jan. 2024
  • Early images from filming showed outfits which were derided online as cheap-looking—and unfaithful to the late Bessette Kennedy’s real aesthetic.
    — Bailey Bujnosek, InStyle, 21 Feb. 2026
  • Ruben’s peroxide dye job and cheap-looking punk-life tattoos belie an innocence in his eyes, an innocence Ahmed infuses with wonder and terror, depending on the situation — and sometimes both.
    — Bill Goodykoontz, The Arizona Republic, 2 Dec. 2020
  • Modest performance, some cheap-looking interior plastics, clumsy optional dual-clutch transmission.
    — Mike Sutton, Car and Driver, 26 May 2021
  • Ironically the previous government, only a generation late, bemoaned that state of affairs, all the while depending on the situation to keep their borrowing cheap or perhaps at the margin possible.
    — Clem Chambers, Forbes, 23 Sep. 2024
  • Low interest rates put in place to support the economy after the Great Recession made borrowing cheap and pushed investors to seek out higher returns from riskier companies, spurring financing and growth for tech companies.
    — Joe Rennison Eli Murray, New York Times, 31 Mar. 2023
  • Unfortunately, that visual sensibility is still tied to some rather cheap-looking CGI, and that’s not even getting into the god-awful script and characterizations.
    — Joe Reid, Vulture, 10 Mar. 2026
  • Made worse by frantic editing and counterintuitive shot framing, the visual effects fluctuate wildly between convincing digital flourishes and surprisingly cheap-looking practical attempts.
    — Alison Foreman, IndieWire, 6 May 2026

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