How to Use gumshoe in a Sentence

gumshoe

noun
  • It’s been a decent summer so far for plucky British gumshoes.
    — Tomris Laffly, Variety, 30 June 2026
  • But any gumshoe worth her salt knows that a closer look reveals that there is more to the story.
    — Husna Haq, The Christian Science Monitor, 1 June 2018
  • Count on Japanese gumshoes to soon start setting their traps.
    — Fortune, 10 Jan. 2020
  • Down there, a new law would require doctors to go gumshoe on the private lives of their patients.
    — Charles P. Pierce, Esquire, 30 Mar. 2017
  • But there’s also enough that’s novel about the show’s cerebral gumshoes to keep viewers rapt, and likely hoping for more.
    — John Anderson, WSJ, 16 Jan. 2020
  • The producer misplaces some of his music, and the player becomes a gumshoe on the case hunting for the lost tunes.
    — Elias Leight, Rolling Stone, 15 Dec. 2021
  • Wednesday has been reduced to a psychic gumshoe prone to seizures and crying blood (or unnamed black fluid) from the overuse of her powers.
    — Daniel Fienberg, HollywoodReporter, 6 Aug. 2025
  • Ultimately, the judge decided to keep the gumshoe locked up pending trial.
    — Mario Ariza, sun-sentinel.com, 8 Dec. 2020
  • These citizen reporters use the gumshoe techniques depended on by the best muckrakers in their craft.
    — Andrew Beaton, WSJ, 12 Dec. 2017
  • Smith here shows the breadth of his acting abilities as the laconic gumshoe Deuce Cooper.
    — Tony Lacy-Thompson, The Mercury News, 18 May 2017
  • Yes, that’s right, the emergence of self-driving cars has all the makings of being a kind of modern-day gumshoe that can be a devout crime fighter.
    — Lance Eliot, Forbes, 22 May 2021
  • In the series, Prioress does a lot more gumshoe investigating.
    — Tracy Brown, Los Angeles Times, 29 July 2022
  • In a landscape of hardened and rugged gumshoes, Precious Ramotswe (Jill Scott) is one with a lot of heart.
    — Ew Staff, EW.com, 17 Mar. 2023
  • Modern-dress spins on old gumshoes are now all the rage; ask Daniel Craig or Benedict Cumberatch.
    — A.a. Dowd, Chron, 16 Feb. 2023
  • No, Mute commits the far worse sin of simply being dull, and running through its amateur gumshoe plot with a curious lack of zeal.
    — David Sims, The Atlantic, 23 Feb. 2018
  • An amateur gumshoe, following the woozy clinking of the out-of-tune jingle, caught up with him near a park in Cobble Hill.
    — Zach Helfand, The New Yorker, 24 Aug. 2020
  • To weed it out, elite operatives hunt in the shadows, deploying drones, social-media and old-fashioned gumshoe tactics in a quest to thwart spies and traitors.
    — Ramin Mostaghim, Los Angeles Times, 19 July 2019
  • Bertin and Forbes ditch most of the gumshoes, sending just a pair of them (Pauline, jut-jawed Brennan) on a fresh and equally loopy adventure.
    — New York Times, 14 Feb. 2020
  • Mystery games give everyday gumshoes an opportunity to practice their sleuthing, or evade capture by role-playing the suspect.
    — Popular Science, 8 Apr. 2020
  • The gumshoe is a former cop with 50 years of experience and an 87% success rate, according to Goncalves.
    — Rebecca Rosenberg, Fox News, 13 Dec. 2022
  • Alex is, at once, a proactive gumshoe and a reactive Mia-Farrow-in-Rosemary’s-Baby-type figure.
    — Daniel Fienberg, HollywoodReporter, 24 Sep. 2025
  • The Mystery of the Carnival Caper (1998) enabled me to live out my girl-gumshoe dreams.
    — Drew Dakessian, Wired, 2 Mar. 2021
  • Referring to himself with words like spy, detective, gumshoe, Wilbur pulls all kinds of sleuth-like maneuvers to find out ingredients and amounts used in the recipes.
    — Pamela McLoughlin, Hartford Courant, 7 Apr. 2026
  • Alas, by then the cheese heiress has skipped the country, and one Mickey Finn later our gumshoe comes to consciousness aboard an eastbound ship on the Atlantic.
    — Kathryn Schulz, New Yorker, 22 Sep. 2025
  • Rob Thomas' plucky teenage gumshoe has grown up and moved to Hulu for her latest, largely disappointing, investigation.
    — Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter, 15 July 2019
  • Yearling Sammy Keyes There have been plenty of kid detectives over the years, particularly high school gumshoes.
    — Maureen Lee Lenker and Devan Coggan, EW.com, 14 Mar. 2023
  • Still, Smith has willingly sacrificed his offense and embraced his role as a basketball gumshoe, tailing and shadowing those who mean to do harm to the Cavs.
    — Bill Livingston, cleveland.com, 9 May 2017
  • The panel does intend on continuing its gumshoe work as long as possible, and is not planning to release its final report until December.
    — Billy House, BostonGlobe.com, 21 Sep. 2022
  • Cage plays Ben Reilly, a gumshoe struggling to remain afloat in New York City in the Great Depression.
    — Daniel Fienberg, HollywoodReporter, 22 May 2026
  • Likewise, there were millions who, in the waning days of the campaign, clicked happily on a salacious dossier of anti-Trump material gathered by gumshoes in an effort to stop him.
    — David Von Drehle, Time, 13 July 2017

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