How to Use ferryman in a Sentence

ferryman

noun
  • The ship docked at the pier and the ferryman lowered the ramp.
    — Yi-Ling Liu, Harper's Magazine, 31 Aug. 2019
  • On our glorious boat ride back from the glacier, our ruddy ferryman was beaming.
    — New York Times, 30 Dec. 2017
  • The blind ferryman Ayoub lives in the swamps of southern Iraq.
    — Annika Pham, Variety, 18 May 2024
  • What’s more, the ferrymen would take advantage of passengers.
    — Julia Buckley, CNN Money, 9 Mar. 2026
  • Many cultures in antiquity have buried their dead with coins as a way to pay a mythical ferryman to take their souls into the afterlife.
    — New York Times, 18 May 2018
  • The narrator spends much of her time with an old man, a former ferryman who lives on a boat that now registers to them only as an unusable object.
    — Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker, 6 Nov. 2019
  • His father, also a ferryman among other things, was James Cook Bourland.
    — Tom Dillard, Arkansas Online, 21 Dec. 2020
  • In another, a Nordic ferryman, restlessly nostalgic for his youth as a sailor, steers his vessel full of commuters toward the open sea.
    — Sam Sacks, WSJ, 9 Aug. 2018
  • Politics are tangled up with love and passion in this drama, whose title refers to the Aeneid’s Charon, the ferryman who conveys souls to the land of the dead.
    — Toby Zinman, Philly.com, 6 May 2018
  • Popular lore suggests the dead needed these tokens to pay Charon, the ferryman who transports souls across the River Styx, for safe passage.
    — Theresa MacHemer, Smithsonian Magazine, 1 July 2020
  • Social media was flooded by images of Paddington Bear as a twee ferryman to Hades, leading the sovereign off the mortal coil.
    — Leila Latif, Chron, 5 Nov. 2022
  • Even as few vehicles used the Rodolfo Robles bridge, the ferrymen went back and forth, back and forth, each time bringing more and more people to Mexico.
    — David Culver, CNN, 26 Sep. 2023
  • Before the pandemic, visitors from the American side could walk across at low water or hail a Mexican ferryman to row them across in a wooden boat.
    — Joe Yogerst, CNN, 16 June 2021
  • The title sees players navigate a spiritual narrative — where a ferryman shepherds souls to the afterlife — using their own blinking eyes.
    — Trilby Beresford, The Hollywood Reporter, 7 Apr. 2022
  • So the current heat wave, which is a reference to sort of Greek mythology to this ferryman who carried the dead across the waters of the Hades, the space that separates the living and the dead.
    — Mark Sovel, USA TODAY, 22 July 2023
  • As the story goes, Streeter was a ferryman on Lake Michigan when a storm beached his craft on an offshore sandbar in July 1886.
    — Dylan Taylor-Lehman, Popular Mechanics, 29 July 2021
  • The ritzy Van Peteghem clan vacations in their villa overlooking the bay; the Brufort family of mussel-gatherers and ferrymen live on a ramshackle farm in the lowlands.
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 14 Apr. 2017
  • Director Nicolo Donato’s grandfather was one of the ferrymen.
    — Loren King, BostonGlobe.com, 19 Apr. 2018
  • Scientists have now confirmed that the creature is a second sighting of the species Bathochordaeus charon, named for the mythical Greek ferryman who was thought to transport souls of the dead across the River Styx.
    — Brian Clark Howard, National Geographic, 6 Dec. 2016
  • Proctor Bennett, of the Department of Social Contracts, has a satisfying career as a ferryman, gently shepherding people through the retirement process—and, when necessary, enforcing it.
    — Sarah Yang, Sunset Magazine, 6 Jan. 2023
  • The beach, a scintillating embodiment of the California Dream just a couple of hours earlier, now looked more like the landing pad for Charon, the mythological ferryman of Hades, with wisps of yellow smoke hovering above leaden waves and pebbles.
    — Anastasia Edel, The New York Review of Books, 17 Sep. 2020
  • Determined to save it, Imbersago Mayor Fabio Vergani obtained a ferryman’s license himself and, together with the local tourism association, assembled a team of volunteers.
    — ABC News, 9 June 2026
  • In what is considered one of the greatest works in the history of European literature, Dante and Virgil travel to the Underworld, where they are taken across the River Styx to Hell by the ferryman Charon — in fact, two of Pluto's moons, Charon and Styx, are named after these details.
    — Keith Cooper, Space.com, 11 May 2026

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