How to Use deadbeat in a Sentence

deadbeat

1 of 2 noun
  • His friends are just a bunch of deadbeats.
  • He was accused of being a deadbeat.
  • Torres nods and goes out to the street to await the arrival of the deadbeat.
    — Glenn Garvin, miamiherald, 28 Mar. 2018
  • Getting the deadbeat out of your lives may not be as simple as telling him to scram.
    — Abigail Van Buren, oregonlive, 13 Nov. 2022
  • The world’s biggest deadbeat has passed the begging bowl again.
    — Jason Ma, Fortune, 13 Oct. 2025
  • My poor mother has spent too many years putting up with feeble hugs from the arms of her deadbeat son.
    — Jason Gay, WSJ, 23 Apr. 2021
  • Nick is a deadbeat father who has no bedroom for his daughter to sleep in.
    — Rachel Handler, Vulture, 9 Dec. 2025
  • Proponents said the law will rein in sky-high drug prices and corporate tax deadbeats.
    — Jon Chesto, BostonGlobe.com, 11 June 2023
  • My ex was the typical deadbeat dad -- never there for his children.
    — Abigail Van Buren, oregonlive, 23 Feb. 2022
  • Half the customers were panicked deadbeat dads buying drum sets at full price because the store was gonna close in two hours.
    — Tom Scharpling, Vulture, 12 July 2021
  • Zoey’s deadbeat father, who left her as a baby to become a rock star, does not show up to do any sort of healing.
    — Rachel Handler, Vulture, 9 Dec. 2025
  • Andres was born in Cuba to a deadbeat alcoholic who beat him.
    — Grethel Aguila, Miami Herald, 5 Nov. 2025
  • That hasn’t yet happened to the world’s most notorious deadbeat.
    — Mary Anastasia O’Grady, WSJ, 6 Aug. 2023
  • Regular old deadbeat parents who left their daughter on a garbage desert planet.
    — Matt Miller, Esquire, 19 Dec. 2017
  • The video footage revealed that both dads actively took care of their young (at least until one became a deadbeat).
    — Elizabeth Preston, Discover Magazine, 22 Dec. 2016
  • Her deadbeat husband is out of work and has used up all of her money, leaving bills unpaid and the bank breathing down her neck.
    — Holly Jones, Variety, 16 Feb. 2022
  • Truly Tainted is the lowlife deadbeat who took the fresh bouquet and replaced it with dead flowers.
    — Sainted & Tainted Writers, Twin Cities, 10 June 2017
  • Her choice to martyr herself to a husband who sounds like a selfish deadbeat must seem puzzling to you, but your role here is not to fix her life.
    — Amy Dickinson, cleveland, 18 Aug. 2022
  • Despite being a genius, he was kicked out of college after doing a favor for his deadbeat friend.
    — Time, 11 Aug. 2023
  • Background checks are performed on borrowers and their businesses to weed out the litigious and deadbeats.
    — Los Angeles Times, 1 Aug. 2019
  • She is made into a lurid tabloid figure, an exotic exception to the common deadbeat father.
    — Amanda Hess, New York Times, 14 Jan. 2022
  • Anyone magnanimous enough to apologize to a deadbeat layabout like me (and my staff) doesn't deserve to be banned from anywhere.
    — Li Cohen, CBS News, 18 Oct. 2022
  • Charlie himself is a little harder to convince, considering his dad too much of a deadbeat to have such a cool shadow life.
    — David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter, 10 Aug. 2022
  • The song, a hymnal fantasy about murdering her close friend's deadbeat dad, is pretty much factual.
    — Ilana Kaplan, EW.com, 16 June 2021
  • Fox went on a long Instagram rant about how feckless her ex Peter Artemiev was, calling him a deadbeat dad.
    — Vulture, 22 Nov. 2022
  • The one-of-a-kind table clock offers the display of three time zones on three trapezoidal dials and a deadbeat seconds mechanism marking home time.
    — Cait Bazemore, Robb Report, 20 July 2023
  • Andres was born in Cuba to a deadbeat alcoholic who beat him, according to his attorneys.
    — Grethel Aguila, Miami Herald, 20 Nov. 2025
  • Chalamet plays a deadbeat virus son who threatens to get the vaccine and bemoans his parents have neglected him during the second wave.
    — Patrick Ryan, USA TODAY, 14 Dec. 2020
  • To put in the capital — in colloquial terms, America is not a deadbeat nation.
    — Jim Tankersley, New York Times, 2 May 2023
  • If the House fails to appropriate the minimum payments required by law, the state will be a deadbeat and will be treated as such in the future.
    — Author: Charles Wohlforth | Opinion, Anchorage Daily News, 1 Feb. 2018

deadbeat

2 of 2 adjective
  • And sure, why not a deadbeat dad who emerges from the gutter to hit him up for money?
    — Scott Meslow, GQ, 25 Feb. 2018
  • Cash assistance is a lever to encourage deadbeat dads to pay up.
    — The Editorial Board, WSJ, 8 July 2018
  • Otherwise every deadbeat dad could claim to be an unwilling one.
    — Kwame Anthony Appiah, New York Times, 2 Aug. 2017
  • The player begins the game as a deadbeat janitor already burned out with the daily grind.
    — Todd Martens, latimes.com, 16 June 2018
  • In return, a murderer with 19 notches on his gun would wind up spending not much more time in jail than a deadbeat dad.
    — Howard Blum, The Hive, 1 Dec. 2017
  • Eustace recently made claims that Dean might (allegedly) be a deadbeat dad.
    — Martha Ross, The Mercury News, 3 Mar. 2017
  • The detective’s wife, tiring of her husband’s dedication to his job and his deadbeat friend.
    — Heather Grevatt, idahostatesman, 2 June 2017
  • The pace and tone varies over the show’s short run, but the seemingly deadbeat characters are always charming and three-dimensional.
    — Margaret Lyons, New York Times, 27 Mar. 2020
  • Lawrence stars as a teenage girl eking out a hardscrabble existence in the Ozarks while searching for her missing deadbeat father.
    — Emma Dibdin and Kayleigh Roberts, Marie Claire, 21 May 2019
  • Lawrence stars as a teenage girl eking out a hardscrabble existence in the Ozarks while searching for her missing deadbeat father.
    — Emma Dibdin, Marie Claire, 18 Aug. 2017
  • Now, however, after a trip with Duke to their deadbeat dad’s, Frankie’s back, hugging Sam like a little kid.
    — Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker, 13 Apr. 2020
  • But in 2014, the state adopted a system that helped suppliers pass on the risk of deadbeat customers to the utilities.
    — Jon Chesto, BostonGlobe.com, 29 Mar. 2018
  • Flowers gave Brucie, a deadbeat dad, levels of humanity beyond his ne’er-do-well appearance.
    — Matthew J. Palm, orlandosentinel.com, 10 Dec. 2019
  • Waitress follows Jenna's bumpy journey as a small town waitress with big dreams of entering a pie-making contest in order to leave her deadbeat husband, Earl.
    — Sarah Grace Hart, Teen Vogue, 26 July 2018
  • Historically, eviction was intended to be faster and simpler than other civil litigation so that landlords could quickly reclaim their property from deadbeat tenants.
    — Rikka Fountain, WSJ, 1 June 2018
  • The Gallaghers are the world's most dysfunctional family, complete with a deadbeat father, an MIA mother, and six kids who never (ever) seem to make a good decision.
    — Stacey Grant, Seventeen, 14 Sep. 2017
  • What’s the biggest misconception about Black fathers The biggest misconception about Black fathers is that most of us are inactive and uninterested in raising our children, or just straight up deadbeat dads.
    — Danielle Pointdujour, Essence, 13 June 2019
  • As the onscreen ex-wife of Casey Affleck’s deadbeat janitor, Williams has one big scene that rivals the emotional impact of everything else in the film—a feat that the supporting categories typically reward.
    — Michael Schulman, The New Yorker, 7 Feb. 2017
  • And in any event, treating beneficiaries of programs like Medicaid as presumptively deadbeat (when arguably the public benefits significantly from their better health) is a concept that can easily be applied to citizens as to noncitizens.
    — Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, 8 Feb. 2018

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