How to Use house of cards in a Sentence

house of cards

noun phrase
  • When that doesn’t happen, the house of cards falls apart.
    — Kristian Winfield, New York Daily News, 8 Jan. 2026
  • Any plan is a house of cards until this network of fraud is removed.
    — Kaitlyn Schallhorn, Oc Register, 4 May 2026
  • Plus the online ad business is rife with click fraud; the whole thing may be a house of cards.
    — Zeynep Tufekci, WIRED, 21 Jan. 2019
  • But Booth understands the roster is built for that run like a house of cards.
    — Bennett Durando, The Denver Post, 7 Feb. 2025
  • When the house of cards began to fall, Murdaugh murdered his wife and son.
    — Julia Reinstein, ABC News, 1 Apr. 2024
  • Until Gilmore signed, the group, in general, felt a bit like a house of cards.
    — Alec Lewis, The Athletic, 19 Aug. 2024
  • Kevin Spacey's personal house of cards is still tumbling down.
    — Ryan Coleman, Entertainment Weekly, 11 Mar. 2026
  • But gathering that data is like trying to build a house of cards in a windstorm.
    — Marianne Lehnis, Forbes, 26 Feb. 2025
  • Don’t build yourself a house of cards that could be avoided by simply putting someone else in charge for a few days.
    — Jodie Cook, Forbes, 13 Jan. 2025
  • Making matters worse was the fact that these fortunes were built on a financial house of cards.
    — Kate Aronoff, The New Republic, 14 June 2023
  • Notre-Dame’s walls somehow didn’t collapse like a house of cards, as firefighters feared.
    — Michael Kimmelman, New York Times, 6 Dec. 2024
  • When a transit agency breaks down, others can step up in its place; like a house of cards that lean on each other for support.
    — Chase Hunter, Mercury News, 8 Apr. 2026
  • Video of the collapse, which shows the structure tumbling like a house of cards, quickly spread like wildfire online.
    — Jasmine Baehr, FOXNews.com, 31 Jan. 2026
  • That was such an anthem for Derek to just get into this headspace of feeling like a badass, even though it's all built on a house of cards.
    — The Enquirer, 12 Jan. 2024
  • That was such an anthem for Derek to just get into this headspace of feeling like a badass, even though it's all built on a house of cards.
    — The Enquirer, 12 Jan. 2024
  • Milwaukee’s defensive structure tends to collapse like a house of cards.
    — Brian Sampson, Forbes.com, 16 Apr. 2025
  • The house of cards that Vladimir Putin has so carefully stacked over more than two decades is folding before our eyes.
    — Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, TIME, 10 Dec. 2024
  • The numbers must go up to keep this bubble from popping so annual growth is the only way to keep this whole house of cards from crumbling.
    — Michael Casagrande | [email protected], al, 8 Aug. 2023
  • Like a house of cards, policies alone are fragile without strong cultural foundations.
    — Expert Panel®, Forbes, 6 Mar. 2025
  • A lot of this movie takes place outside the concert venue, which doesn’t help matters; expanding the canvas just makes the whole house of cards fall apart.
    — Tim Grierson, Vulture, 26 July 2021
  • The house of cards may not tumble tomorrow, but not even Russia can keep fighting this way forever.
    — Joshua Keating, Vox, 7 Dec. 2018
  • Four thick, square bronze slabs, each pierced by a circular hole, are stacked atop a rectilinear base like a precarious house of cards.
    — Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times, 13 Aug. 2024
  • However, what seemed like the perfect life was really a complex house of cards built on lies and insanity.
    — David Hookstead Outkick, FOXNews.com, 16 June 2026
  • To speculate on such matters in a situation as fluid as this is like trying to build a house of cards in a whitewater raft.
    — M.l. Elrick, Detroit Free Press, 21 July 2024
  • But Laesch views much of that progress as a house of cards, with too many new businesses opening up that had no good plans for sustainability.
    — Denise Crosby, Chicago Tribune, 31 Aug. 2025
  • In the age where tin-foil hat conspiracies go mainstream, cracking the door with any breadcrumb to doubt the integrity of games was rigged or fixed builds a house of cards.
    — Michael Casagrande | [email protected], al, 13 July 2023
  • In the meantime, the structure of global health efforts is like a house of cards, highly vulnerable to prevailing winds.
    — Laurie Garrett, Foreign Affairs, 6 Mar. 2012
  • If so, the argument went, the very foundations of mathematics would be flawed, and the entire subject would collapse like a house of cards.
    — Manon Bischoff, Scientific American, 1 Oct. 2024
  • Sundar Pichai and Sam Altman are building a spectacular house of cards.
    — Sunil Sharan, Fortune, 27 May 2026
  • Some have argued that OpenAI itself could be a house of cards that’s one run on the banks away from collapsing in on itself.
    — Victor Tangermann, Futurism, 29 Jan. 2026

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