How to Use dead letter in a Sentence

dead letter

noun
  • Agreements meant to last decades became a dead letter.
    — Stephania Taladrid, New Yorker, 17 June 2026
  • Overnight, Roe became a dead letter in the second largest state.
    — CNN, 17 Sep. 2021
  • Sign up His deal is already a dead letter in the upper chamber.
    — Grace Segers, The New Republic, 14 June 2023
  • Until the past few months, this policy has been pretty much of a dead letter.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 23 Sep. 2014
  • Were these powers beyond the reach of the people’s power, impeachment would be a dead letter.
    — Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, 21 Oct. 2019
  • The old agreement, which was negotiated in the ’70s, was a dead letter.
    — Anousha Sakoui, Los Angeles Times, 1 Mar. 2021
  • Today, to our peril, the Monroe Doctrine is becoming a dead letter.
    — Steve Forbes, Forbes, 24 Sep. 2024
  • Mexico’s antislavery laws might have been a dead letter, if not for the ordinary people, of all races, who risked their lives to protect fugitive slaves.
    — Alice Baumgartner, The New Yorker, 19 Nov. 2020
  • With countries struggling to meet even their most basic obligations under the Paris agreement, the treaty is at risk of becoming a dead letter.
    — Jessica F. Green, Foreign Affairs, 7 Nov. 2025
  • While insistence on a balanced budget in exchange for debt limit concessions is also a dead letter, steps in that direction need to be part of the discourse.
    — Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., Forbes, 8 Sep. 2021
  • But the reality is that, because of such misgivings, the border tax probably has been a dead letter for months now, though its proponents haven’t given up.
    — Gerald F. Seib, WSJ, 18 July 2017
  • But despite the positive attention these proposals initially received, most of them remain dead letters just one year later.
    — Matthias Matthijs, Foreign Affairs, 12 Dec. 2025
  • Put another way, ICE’s new interpretation turns the statute into a dead letter.
    — Noah Feldman, Mercury News, 4 Feb. 2026
  • Put another way, ICE’s new interpretation turns the statute into a dead letter.
    — Noah Feldman, Twin Cities, 6 Feb. 2026
  • That amendment had been made a dead letter by Jim Crow state legislatures and an acquiescent Supreme Court.
    — Robert D. Bland, The Conversation, 30 Apr. 2026
  • That amendment had been made a dead letter by Jim Crow state legislatures and an acquiescent Supreme Court.
    — Robert D. Bland, The Conversation, 3 Feb. 2026
  • The note makes its way to the desk of Jasper, a seasoned ‘dead letter’ investigator at a 1980s midwestern post office.
    — Matt Grobar, Deadline, 13 Feb. 2025
  • But in practice, this law has been close to a dead letter, at least for Supreme Court justices, because its somewhat vague prohibitions contain no enforcement mechanism.
    — Simon Lazarus, The New Republic, 16 Mar. 2023
  • The Postal Service identified the dead letter carrier as Mary Granados, 29.
    — Tim Stelloh, NBC News, 2 Sep. 2019
  • For that crowd, American patriotism — love for our creeds of liberty and devotion to the Constitution — is already a dead letter.
    — Jonah Goldberg, National Review, 16 Feb. 2018
  • Forget takings — Congress could render any part of the Constitution a dead letter by repealing or modifying the statutes that empower courts to provide remedies.
    — Rob Johnson, National Review, 27 Jan. 2024
  • Without one, Section 5 is effectively a dead letter, with dire consequences for the integrity of American democracy.
    — Matt Ford, The New Republic, 11 July 2018
  • But rather than rest its case on tried and true constitutional provisions, the government watchdog asked a federal judge to bring to life, for the first time in American history, the dead letter of the foreign emoluments clause.
    — Cristian Farias, Daily Intelligencer, 19 Oct. 2017
  • That includes judges who recently ruled on cases involving January 6 sympathizers and concluded that Section Three was now a dead letter.
    — Matt Ford, The New Republic, 13 Aug. 2023
  • These laws aren’t just dead letters, either; southern conservative politicians are touting them as a sword against local governments who dare take down Confederate monuments, not just a shield against protestors and defilers.
    — Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, 19 Apr. 2018
  • But impeachment, once seen as perhaps the most serious check on corruption and abuse of power developed by the founders, now looks in danger of becoming a constitutional dead letter, just another weapon in today’s bitter, tit-for-tat partisan wars.
    — Peter Baker, New York Times, 1 Feb. 2024
  • While Chicago is at no imminent risk of instituting Johnson’s jobs tax following the City Council’s adamant rejection, Springfield ought to make the possibility of a later revival of that policy a dead letter.
    — The Editorial Board, Chicago Tribune, 7 Apr. 2026

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