How to Use crackpot in a Sentence

crackpot

noun
  • Some crackpot in a clown suit is out there directing traffic.
  • At the time, de Grey was viewed as a brilliant crackpot.
    — Tad Friend, New Yorker, 4 Aug. 2025
  • The crackpots are the mainstream.
    — David Frum, The Atlantic, 31 Dec. 2025
  • All the signs had been there that Brooks was a dangerous crackpot.
    — Kyle Whitmire, al, 7 Jan. 2021
  • Then there were the crackpot claims that Palin was not the real mother of Trig.
    — T.a. Frank, Washington Post, 12 July 2022
  • So, my command-and-control junky friends, don’t give me any sob stories of how the crackpots on your team have slowed you down.
    — Jon Caldara, The Denver Post, 2 Apr. 2017
  • Bobby Kennedy and his crackpot ideas will do great harm to Americans.
    — New York Daily News Editorial Board, New York Daily News, 29 Jan. 2025
  • But Cassidy Quinn simply would not give in, Call her crazy, a nutjob or crackpot.
    — Lou Craft, New York Times, 12 June 2017
  • Joe Rogan may sometimes go too far in promoting crackpot ideas about vaccines.
    — Damon Linker, The Week, 1 Feb. 2022
  • Yet the most crackpot thing about Elena Vernham (Kate Winslet) might be her singing.
    — Patrick Ryan, USA TODAY, 4 Mar. 2024
  • Many historians treat the Populist revolt as a crackpot movement that fell by the wayside.
    — Robert Kuttner, The New York Review of Books, 13 Apr. 2021
  • Much like the one Alabama needs right now — because our crackpot politicians are causing a scene again and people are getting hurt.
    — Kyle Whitmire | [email protected], al, 9 Jan. 2021
  • The Filipino Fox Rodrigo Duterte is not the crackpot he is sometimes made to seem.
    — Alastair McIndoe, Foreign Affairs, 10 June 2024
  • So requiring the site to post anything any crackpot has to say is in no way a First Amendment violation.
    — Jack Greiner, The Enquirer, 2 Oct. 2022
  • Most researchers considered that a crackpot theory.
    — Gregory Barber, Quanta Magazine, 15 Sep. 2025
  • The idea that Harding might have been assassinated wasn’t confined to craven opportunists or the crackpot fringe.
    — Greg Daugherty, Smithsonian Magazine, 1 Aug. 2023
  • The claim that state legislatures may have powers to intervene in disputed elections is not, in fact, a crackpot theory.
    — Steve Coll, The New Yorker, 18 Dec. 2020
  • Tremendous efforts have been made to shout down the truth, and the same crackpots, self-promoters, liars, and failures, are quoted repeatedly in the media.
    — David Dobbs, WIRED, 10 Mar. 2011
  • That’s the inevitable outcome when a crackpot conspiracy theorist who spouts nothing but lies is given a platform like the one Kennedy now has.
    — Michael Tomasky, The New Republic, 17 July 2023
  • Artists have always used music to question authority and expose the cracks (and the crackpots) in the American story.
    — Time, 6 May 2026
  • This neighbor lies and puts others at risk with those lies, spreads misinformation and crackpot theories about a global pandemic and is against a vaccine that saves lives.
    — Christine Brennan, USA TODAY, 8 Nov. 2021
  • The scruffy daredevil and wannabe folk hero had morphed into a crackpot involved in a paradoxical attempt to use science in order to undermine it.
    — David Howard, Popular Mechanics, 30 Aug. 2020
  • He's seen a flurry of reaction to his plans, with detractors labeling him a crackpot for planning the launch in a homemade contraption and his belief that the world is flat.
    — Pat Graham, Michael Balsamo, Popular Mechanics, 25 Mar. 2018
  • So like Janet Mills, crackpot fellow traveler Jared Golden was getting muscled… from the left.
    — Howie Carr, Boston Herald, 7 Nov. 2025
  • Statements to the contrary, official-sounding people cautioned, were probably the musings of crackpots in tinfoil hats.
    — Cleve R. Wootson Jr., Washington Post, 18 Dec. 2017
  • McBride unfolds the efforts to rescue Dodo, plus side plots involving crackpot business schemes and sleazy bigwigs, with his trademark skill, brio, and frank talk.
    — Erin Douglass, The Christian Science Monitor, 12 Oct. 2023
  • This also means that the BOG regularly fields a number of outlandish, crackpot proposals that would never pass muster.
    — Tyler Freel, Outdoor Life, 3 Jan. 2024
  • In a sane world, someone who claimed that one of the most beneficial accomplishments in human history — the polio vaccine — did more harm than good would be seen as a dangerous crackpot.
    — U T Editorial Board, San Diego Union-Tribune, 26 Sep. 2025
  • In Brazil, where polling shows that 33 percent of people believe in extraterrestrial life, ufologists are not treated as crackpots.
    — Terrence McCoy, Washington Post, 6 Sep. 2023
  • It was agreed that Spook was just another smart-ass bumpkin until, when the boys were in middle school, he was elected to the legislature and served two full terms as a renowned crackpot, in the papers all the time.
    — Thomas McGuane, The New Yorker, 3 Oct. 2022

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