How to Use deniable in a Sentence

deniable

adjective
  • The best way to describe them is a covert, deniable first-strike weapon.
    — Fox News, 13 June 2019
  • This is instant, global, and quite deniable.
    — Dana Taylor, USA Today, 11 Feb. 2026
  • The government would show up with nothing on paper about its plans, sticking instead to deniable verbal statements.
    — The Economist, 29 Aug. 2019
  • But well before then, the politics of self-presentation had coalesced around grander, less deniable hair.
    — Wesley Morris, New York Times, 14 Oct. 2020
  • The air attacks on Saudi oil facilities were more pointed — and perhaps more deniable.
    — Los Angeles Times, 18 Sep. 2019
  • Russia has relied on informal and deniable military forces since the Stalin era.
    — Andrei Soldatov, Foreign Affairs, 12 May 2023
  • This might take the form of a cyberattack or other deniable but dramatic action to send a message about their resolve over Syria and even the score.
    — David Hambling, Popular Mechanics, 19 June 2017
  • Precise, deniable, and in Russia’s case, grimly familiar.
    — Freddie Clayton, NBC news, 15 Feb. 2026
  • And, when the Russian state needed a deniable shadow force of mercenaries, Wagner was born.
    — Joshua Yaffa, The New Yorker, 24 Aug. 2023
  • But since at least the 1990s, Moscow has used them as deniable proxies for its military interventions abroad.
    — Owen Matthews, Newsweek, 17 Jan. 2018
  • Policymakers can also use coercive tools that are more deniable or otherwise less visible to the public.
    — Erik Lin-Greenberg, Foreign Affairs, 8 Oct. 2024
  • Instead, politicians preside over a system that uses plausibly deniable violence to maintain power and to keep perks flowing to a privileged few.
    — Rachel Kleinfeld, WSJ, 9 Nov. 2018
  • The official said that Iran’s policy has been to conduct deniable attacks, a fiction that the United States would no longer allow.
    — New York Times, 30 Dec. 2019
  • Wagner operated for years as a deniable military force for the Kremlin, in Syria and across Africa.
    — Patrick Reevell, ABC News, 23 Aug. 2023
  • Many experts believe Tehran is biding its time to plot deniable revenge attacks on US targets using regional terror groups.
    — Stephen Collinson, CNN, 28 Feb. 2020
  • Which is why any new accords with Russia, to be truly effective, would have to embrace Russia’s turn toward deniable, hard-to-detect cyberweapons.
    — New York Times, 24 Jan. 2022
  • At their subsequent trials some officials involved claimed that Reagan knew about the broad outline of the scheme, if not all its details, but at the time his involvement was entirely deniable.
    — The Economist, 12 Dec. 2019
  • How would a government or military react to an attack from a source that is autonomous, overwhelming in numbers, and completely deniable in terms of ownership?
    — James Floyd Kelly, WIRED, 12 July 2012
  • Given that Centcom already consumes most such resources, a good first step would be to improve management of its in-theater assets to prevent deniable attacks by Iran.
    — Kathryn Wheelbarger and Dustin Walker, WSJ, 21 Dec. 2020
  • Iran has been wildly hamstrung in the past six months, as its war with Israel, usually in the shadows or deniable, evolved into high-stakes and largely ineffective long-range missile attacks.
    — Nick Paton Walsh, CNN, 7 Dec. 2024
  • Rather than declare open war on the international order, Russia was using digital means to undermine it with brazen but deniable acts of cyber sabotage.
    — Andy Greenberg, Wired, 28 Sep. 2021
  • The Future is private weather, technological prophecy and highly deniable weapons.
    — Sarah Yang, Sunset Magazine, 22 Sep. 2023
  • In this context, the idea of Veselnitskaya as a deniable intermediary is not entirely implausible.
    — Mark Galeotti, The Atlantic, 12 July 2017
  • Another movie is being developed around the Thunderbolts, a team of enhanced agents who engage in deniable military operations.
    — Evan Narcisse, Rolling Stone, 14 Nov. 2022
  • This network of private mercenary companies is deployed broadly around the world, serving as a deniable and expendable extension of the Kremlin’s foreign policy.
    — Sebastien Roblin, Forbes, 15 Aug. 2022
  • The family-friendly megacompany can produce bleak material with a social purpose or mature subject matter under cover of plausibly deniable metaphor.
    — Darren Franich, EW.com, 12 Nov. 2019
  • If the Iranian regime survives in weakened form, Beijing will likely calibrate limited, deniable support while avoiding overcommitment.
    — John Calabrese, The Conversation, 6 Mar. 2026
  • Ben Wallace, Britain’s defence secretary, has pointed to the example of the Wagner group, a mercenary force that serves as a deniable arm of Russian power in several warzones.
    — The Economist, 15 Sep. 2020
  • Analysts describe the group as an extension of Russia’s foreign policy through deniable activities, including the use of mercenaries and disinformation campaigns.
    — New York Times, 31 May 2022
  • As Russia invades Ukraine, the Kremlin is pushing to amplify influence worldwide, and ostensibly private military groups like Wagner offer a deniable way to advance its goals, researchers say.
    — Washington Post, 9 Mar. 2022

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