How to Use gauche in a Sentence

gauche

adjective
  • Would it be gauche of me to ask her how old she is?
  • This eerie display of the male gaze was gauche and left me feeling sticky.
    — Jill Gutowitz, Glamour, 6 Oct. 2017
  • Lighting up a big smelly joint may, let’s hope, come to be seen as simply gauche.
    — Robin Abrahams, BostonGlobe.com, 19 June 2018
  • Even by those standards, his latest scheme is remarkably gauche.
    — Matt Ford, The New Republic, 26 Aug. 2019
  • Think the bigger the better, and with tinted lenses in bright, gauche colors.
    — Christian Allaire, Vogue, 28 Oct. 2019
  • Having people over to sell them stuff is kind of gauche, at least among twenty- and thirtysomethings in Brooklyn.
    — Amanda Shapiro, Bon Appetit, 26 Mar. 2018
  • The idea that the left has enemies who must be roundly defeated remains too gauche for many Democrats.
    — Alex Shephard, The New Republic, 27 Dec. 2019
  • The first scene has Tirzah limply sliding out onstage, crying, after the rape, then promptly sliding back off in a gauche display.
    — Maya Phillips, New York Times, 24 Oct. 2019
  • Dreher does not claim to be anything so gauche as a segregationist or a neo-Confederate.
    — Sarah Jones, New Republic, 25 Jan. 2018
  • And where better to contrast our hero’s love of old world, old money aesthetics with the gauche American nouveau?
    — Brittany Allen, Literary Hub, 19 Nov. 2025
  • The painting has none of the gauche and gritty credibility of the Degas hanging beside it.
    — Sebastian Smee, Washington Post, 25 June 2019
  • Not long after the app first launched, simply running photos of the site of a tragedy through Instagram’s default filtering tools was seen as gauche.
    — Taylor Lorenz, The Atlantic, 12 June 2019
  • Number disclosure is considered as gauche as bragging about your massive pay increase for doing the exact same job as your coworker.
    — Sloane Crosley, The Cut, 26 Mar. 2018
  • At the price point of this restaurant, where fish entrees start at $39, are customers really going to want to see something so gauche as dead fish in the dining room?
    — Soleil Ho, San Francisco Chronicle, 25 Oct. 2021
  • Not since Jack Nicklaus ambled down the fairway in plaid Sansabelt trousers has golf wear looked this wonderfully gauche.
    — Steven Kurutz, star-telegram.com, 27 Apr. 2017
  • Old money, historically, has been stereotyped as having a Brahmin disdain for such a gauche topic.
    — Paul Sullivan, New York Times, 19 May 2017
  • Sontag is the gauche one here, seeing other people only in relation to herself, without any sense of their separate existence.
    — Michael Gorra, The New York Review of Books, 11 Feb. 2020
  • Members of his Cabinet, by contrast, seem like gauche arrivistes, riding their boss’s coattails at great taxpayer expense.
    — Dahlia Lithwick, Slate Magazine, 13 Oct. 2017
  • The cast largely helps to keep things grounded, rebutting the histrionics by treating each claim with legitimacy or reciting each gauche line with apt conviction.
    — Ben Travers, IndieWire, 6 Nov. 2025
  • The reason is very simple—the Noto palazzo was very gauche and fit for the party later in the season, to be thrown by Hollander’s character.
    — Charlie Hobbs, Condé Nast Traveler, 9 Dec. 2022
  • Talking about profit when these companies are growing so quickly may seem gauche to some investors, but there’s a lot of venture capital money riding on the answers to these questions.
    — John Detrixhe, Quartz, 1 Aug. 2019
  • Today, mass production and an abundance of cheap knockoffs have rendered conspicuous consumption unremarkable at best and gauche at worst.
    — J.c. Pan, New Republic, 1 Aug. 2017
  • The public is starting to turn against its influencer and celebrity populations and their gauche displays, with a few calling for their execution by guillotine.
    — Brennan Kilbane, Allure, 23 Apr. 2020
  • Celebrities are brilliantly monetizing a new technological practice that a mere decade or two ago would have been regarded as gauche and narcissistic.
    — Teddy Wayne, New York Times, 15 Apr. 2016
  • Another newspaper innovation introduced by Nicholson was a society column, which was seen by some in the city as gauche and bordering on scandalous.
    — NOLA.com, 24 Jan. 2018
  • Thrift was comforting; material goods uninteresting, bordering on gauche.
    — Gary Shteyngart, The New Yorker, 20 Mar. 2017
  • For Germans, displays of patriotism are broadly considered gauche, owing to the enduring national guilt from World War II.
    — Sara Germano, Sportico.com, 29 June 2026
  • Or—my personal favorite—Matthew Macfadyen as Shiv‘s arriviste, excruciatingly gauche boyfriend, Tom.
    — Taylor Antrim, Vogue, 8 June 2018
  • But, in today’s Leftist world of intersectionality, 'American' is deemed embarrassing & gauche.
    — Andrew Mark Miller, Washington Examiner, 26 Feb. 2020
  • Yuskavage, a masterful colorist, makes lush, luminous, intentionally — and delightfully — gauche paintings that unsettle facile notions of misogyny, femininity and the female gaze.
    — Julia Felsenthal, New York Times, 12 Feb. 2020

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