How to Use ferret out in a Sentence

ferret out

verb
  • Whatever seems to be wrong is ferreted out.
    — Lance Eliot, Forbes.com, 18 Sep. 2025
  • This time of year, catbirds are ferreting out their nesting and feeding territories.
    — Sheryl De Vore, Chicago Tribune, 27 May 2026
  • Human psychologists could not implant radical beliefs just to see if they could be ferreted out.
    — Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New Yorker, 9 Feb. 2026
  • Instead of waiting for your political opponents to attack, why not get ahead of the story and ferret out waste, fraud and abuse on behalf of your constituents?
    — The Editorial Board, Chicago Tribune, 6 Jan. 2026
  • There’s a real danger for both Galvin and Healey that Foley’s new team will show state agencies run by them have failed to ferret out fraud right under their noses.
    — Joe Battenfeld, Boston Herald, 28 Mar. 2026
  • When this sort of explanation is merely an excuse for gender discrimination, courts ferret out the real reason and punish the culprit.
    — Thomas G. Moukawsher, MSNBC Newsweek, 2 Sep. 2025
  • At the same time, Congress has slashed the IRS’ budget so severely that the agency’s ability to ferret out abuses has been stymied.
    — Justin Elliott, ProPublica, 24 June 2021
  • Moreover, since these frogs can hunker in the mud for days, conservationists resort to pumping water out and allowing the bed to completely dry out, to ferret out every last straggler.
    — Shi En Kim, AZCentral.com, 13 Mar. 2026
  • The most valuable benefit is ferreting out scammers pitching deals, which is a common issue for family offices, Nallen Copley said.
    — Hayley Cuccinello, CNBC, 11 Dec. 2025
  • But good reporters on campuses often ferret out the finalists’ names, especially if their candidates are holding meetings with a variety of stakeholders.
    — The Editorial Board, Chicago Tribune, 8 Jan. 2026
  • Another avenue is for an AI maker to ferret out why their AI is doing some recurring act and then tweak the AI to stop doing so.
    — Lance Eliot, Forbes.com, 18 May 2026
  • According to neighbors, Eurovision organizers are flying multiple drones over the stadium in the lead up to the event while unleashing dogs to ferret out potential explosives.
    — Steven Blum, HollywoodReporter, 12 May 2026
  • His success in ferreting out three American servicemen from Kosovo 15 years later was also broadly celebrated.
    — Kathryn Palmer, USA Today, 21 Feb. 2026
  • Assuming that the client has been using AI to get mental health advice, there are important steps the therapist should consider taking to ferret out the AI usage and its impact on the client.
    — Lance Eliot, Forbes.com, 22 Jan. 2026
  • Taxpayers who believe that enforcement and compliance aren’t as important to tax authorities as before may be caught by surprise, especially as the government increasingly relies on data analytics to ferret out trends and flag outliers.
    — Kelly Phillips Erb, Forbes.com, 11 Aug. 2025
  • But when that proved unsuccessful, the Johns Committee shifted its attention to ferreting out lesbians and gays from positions of power, especially from institutions of education.
    — Julio Capó, Sun Sentinel, 16 Apr. 2026
  • The crackdown was ostensibly to ferret out spies, but in many cases the security forces used the war as a pretext to detain ethnic and religious minorities as well as Afghan migrants, according to Amnesty International.
    — Babak Dehghanpisheh, NBC news, 24 Sep. 2025
  • The latest filing demolishes the timeworn claim that DOGE was infiltrated into Social Security in order to responsibly ferret out fraud and overspending.
    — Business Columnist, Los Angeles Times, 22 Jan. 2026
  • Mindful of the skepticism, Mozilla on Thursday provided a behind-the-scenes look into its use of Anthropic Mythos—an AI model for identifying software vulnerabilities—to ferret out 271 Firefox security flaws over two months.
    — Dan Goodin, ArsTechnica, 7 May 2026

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