How to Use legerdemain in a Sentence

legerdemain

noun
  • That does not mean the game wasn’t bereft of Brady’s fourth-quarter legerdemain.
    — Los Angeles Times, 1 Feb. 2022
  • Others used the moniker as a compliment, owing to his legerdemain.
    — Bruce Nelan, Washington Post, 14 Dec. 2019
  • Yet in the meantime, the legal legerdemain led to immense suffering.
    — Edward Rothstein, WSJ, 29 June 2019
  • But even that bit of binary legerdemain involved a relative unknown and took seven days to pull off.
    — Jack McCallum, SI.com, 9 July 2019
  • Words alone cannot express my perplexed admiration for this legislative piece of legerdemain.
    — Robert G. Eccles, Forbes, 21 Feb. 2023
  • Doing so would require only a little bit of constitutional legerdemain on the high court’s part.
    — Matt Ford, The New Republic, 17 Apr. 2018
  • The play spends a little too much time spinning narrative wheels on the legal legerdemain between Derek and Todd.
    — Kerry Reid, chicagotribune.com, 23 Apr. 2018
  • Unlike the overheated adjectives that preceded it, this bit of legerdemain is a proper noun.
    — Bruce Stockler, Fortune, 5 Apr. 2026
  • His team is developing the bioreactor that performs the legerdemain.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 22 May 2018
  • Sarah Palin lost her libel case against the New York Times, but not without some judicial legerdemain.
    — Nr Editors, National Review, 3 Mar. 2022
  • Any such legislative legerdemain would be an unwarranted assault to circumvent the caps.
    — State Senator Stephen Harding, Hartford Courant, 26 Feb. 2024
  • The molecules that accomplish prime editing’s genetic legerdemain have three parts.
    — Sharon Begley, STAT, 21 Oct. 2019
  • National Review covered the legerdemain used by Stalin and then again by Putin to fuel their rise to absolute power.
    — Peter J. Travers, National Review, 29 Mar. 2022
  • With a conjurer’s legerdemain, Swift slides Jack into the shadows and pushes Ronnie into the spotlight.
    — Malcolm Forbes Special To The Star Tribune, Star Tribune, 18 Sep. 2020
  • But through a combination of legal legerdemain and a lame-duck power grab in Sacramento, the Democratic maps went into place anyway.
    — Chris Stirewalt, The Hill, 24 Apr. 2026
  • In a bit of legislative legerdemain, the House never adjourned for the day, so Friday is still technically Thursday in the House.
    — Bart Jansen, USA TODAY, 1 Oct. 2021
  • There’s legerdemain aplenty in this designer’s work, as well as romance and an unapologetic femininity, which registers as strength to this designer.
    — Laird Borrelli-Persson, Vogue, 20 Feb. 2019
  • Both activities depended on legerdemain and made elaborate use of optical illusions.
    — Jonathon Keats, Forbes, 23 Sep. 2024
  • This bit of conceptual legerdemain functioned as a shorthand for their creative intentions, which were essentially anti-photographic.
    — Chris Wiley, The New Yorker, 8 Nov. 2022
  • The legislative legerdemain needed to craft the multistep procedural agreement and raise the debt limit this year is a sign of the difficulty lawmakers may face on the issue in 2023.
    — Andrew Duehren, WSJ, 15 Dec. 2021
  • But this moment—and the final passage of the IRA itself—shows how the Senate’s rules have devolved the legislative process into an inscrutable whirligig of procedural legerdemain.
    — Matt Ford, The New Republic, 9 Aug. 2022
  • This legerdemain enabled Bragg to circumvent the two-year misdemeanor statute of limitations — in other words, the time to charge this stale case, which is based on seven-year-old bookkeeping entries, lapsed in 2019.
    — The Editors, National Review, 29 May 2024
  • Kennedy’s feat of legal legerdemain means that the Supreme Court has punted on deciding whether anti-discrimination laws that protect gay Americans must yield to a business owner’s religious tenets.
    — Matt Ford, The New Republic, 4 June 2018
  • That legerdemain would be an illusion in the category of the Inflation Reduction Act, which increases inflationary pressures.
    — WSJ, 23 Sep. 2022
  • Political reporters were dazzled by his legerdemain in stealing a traditionally Republican issue, promising more law enforcement on the streets and tougher penalties for juvenile offenders.
    — NBC News, 20 Nov. 2020
  • While the struggle to keep aircraft flying is a commendable exercise in bureaucratic legerdemain and organizational agility, the battle to keep aircraft safe and mission capable is an unsustainable, morale-sapping exercise.
    — Craig Hooper, Forbes, 28 Jan. 2022

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