How to Use quack in a Sentence

quack

1 of 3 verb
  • The mother duck watched, quacking loudly, from a nearby creekbed.
    — Lauren Penington, Denver Post, 18 May 2025
  • The birds scurry between the legs of an older goat, quacking nonstop.
    — Sushmita Pathak, The Christian Science Monitor, 25 Sep. 2024
  • Records show, in recent years, officers forced one inmate to quack like a duck, and another to do bear crawls from the chow hall to her dorm.
    — Julie K. Brown, Miami Herald, 23 Jan. 2025
  • West led the deuce of clubs, which looked, waddled and quacked like a singleton; still, declarer took the queen, drew trumps and led another club.
    — Frank Stewart, The Mercury News, 1 Apr. 2024
  • Lucky Duck also shows up — in person this time — to quack at the panel and give them a late-in-the-game incentive to do better.
    — Lauren Huff, EW.com, 10 Apr. 2025
  • Hypnotherapy is not like stage hypnosis — those performances where someone is put in a trance and ordered to quack like a duck.
    — Elizabeth Chang, Washington Post, 4 Oct. 2022
  • In video shared on social media by the RPD, the ducklings can be heard quacking loudly amid the rescue.
    — Lexi Lane, PEOPLE, 26 Apr. 2026
  • The new 964 iteration of the model looked like a duck, quacked like a duck, but was 80-percent new under its skin.
    — Robert Ross, Robb Report, 2 Jan. 2026
  • Children unfamiliar with the world in time become easy marks for the dealers in fascist politics and quack religions.
    — Henry Freedland, Harpers Magazine, 24 Oct. 2025
  • Children unfamiliar with the world in time become easy marks for the dealers in fascist politics and quack religions.
    — Harpers Magazine, 23 Sep. 2025
  • Officer Susan Perez heard the mother duck quacking loudly for help to save her 11 babies, and jumped into action.
    — Marina Watts, PEOPLE, 16 Jan. 2026
  • Eventually the flock are all waddling on the ice, before returning to the security of the ground, quacking furiously.
    — Dan Perry, Newsweek, 5 Jan. 2025

quack

2 of 3 noun
  • The hen didn't make a quack and remained calm throughout the process.
    — Paul A. Smith, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 22 May 2021
  • When Todd gets something right, a quack can be heard, or at least part of one.
    — George Saunders, The New Yorker, 2 Nov. 2020
  • The hens of many dabbling species make shrill quacks, while drakes make softer peeps and whistles.
    — Will Brantley, Field & Stream, 8 Nov. 2023
  • Automatic ducking doesn't add quacks to your soundtrack.
    — PC Magazine, 15 Nov. 2025
  • The cry of the fishing cat sounds like the quack of a duck, and the rest of this midsize feline also seems tailor-made for the life aquatic.
    — Abigail Tucker, Smithsonian Magazine, 4 Dec. 2022
  • As experts departed, quacks arrived.
    — Charles Bethea, New Yorker, 9 Sep. 2025
  • Remember that the first guy to recommend hand washing between surgeries was considered a quack in his day, and look at how that turned out.
    — Elizabeth Wickman, WSJ, 20 Nov. 2023
  • Unlocking the key to exposing that falsehood could help Gorski debunk a thousand quacks in one fell swoop.
    — Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, The New Republic, 28 Feb. 2023
  • Trump’s Insane Clown Posse Cabinet is very close to being filled with a cadre of fools and quacks, goons and thugs.
    — S.e. Cupp, New York Daily News, 4 Feb. 2025
  • But let’s circle back to TV‘s patron saint of affable, oft–insidious quacks.
    — Ben Travers, IndieWire, 16 Dec. 2025
  • Yet in terms of crafting an entertaining, cheerfully lightweight show around this latest quack attack, the producers have largely achieved their goal.
    — Brian Lowry, CNN, 25 Mar. 2021
  • Paul, speaking to reporters, seemed unfazed by Oz’s determination to supplant him as the Senate’s top quack.
    — Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker, 1 Dec. 2021
  • Canvasbacks aren’t especially boisterous ducks, with the drakes making a low, rolling growl, sometimes described as a croak, and the hens a softer mallard-like quack.
    — M.d. Johnson, Field & Stream, 8 Nov. 2023
  • House Bill 93 essentially criminalized the mills, putting Portsmouth’s quacks on notice.
    — Paul Solotaroff, Rolling Stone, 1 July 2023
  • Many in the life-extension movement are quacks or hacks who peddle pills, potions, and false promises; longevity skeptics tend to see the loss of our capacities as something to accept, not avoid.
    — Dhruv Khullar, The New Yorker, 15 Apr. 2024
  • Amy's every interaction is loaded with dramatic irony, but the audience isn't in a good spot knowing that her teenage daughter actually hates her or that the new chief of internal medicine is a quack who killed a patient.
    — Kelly Lawler, USA TODAY, 8 Jan. 2025
  • This has led advertisers, fearful of being associated with political extremists and anti-vaccine quacks, to flee the platform.
    — Hiawatha Bray, BostonGlobe.com, 3 July 2023
  • Milla — a young woman who feels disillusioned by doctors that treat her like a recalcitrant child, directing even conversations about her treatment to her father instead of her — finds false security in quacks selling enemas and juice cleanses.
    — Angie Han, The Hollywood Reporter, 5 Feb. 2025
  • To its credit, the IPCC has elevated the debate and increased the credibility of climate science, minimizing the impact of climate quacks.
    — Ken Silverstein, Forbes, 12 Feb. 2024
  • Medallion’s Derek Lo figures that his software can cut through the system’s redundancies, slashing the time and cost of paperwork designed to prevent quacks from practicing medicine and safeguard patients that’s spiraled into something burdensome.
    — Amy Feldman, Forbes.com, 20 Aug. 2025
  • In the 1920s, a quack named John Brinkley became a household name by implanting goat testicles into the bodies of patients complaining of infertility and impotence.
    — David Klepper, Fortune Well, 31 Jan. 2024
  • Medallion’s Derek Lo figures that his software can cut through the system’s redundancies, slashing the time and cost of paperwork designed to prevent quacks from practicing medicine and safeguard patients that’s spiraled into something wasteful and burdensome.
    — Amy Feldman, Forbes.com, 18 Aug. 2025
  • Ale’s just been fired from FreezeCorp, a quack company that sells people the promise of putting them in cryogenic sleep until future scientists develop the technology to revive them, and Swinton’s Elizabeth might be willing to extend his visa.
    — Peter Debruge, Variety, 14 Mar. 2023

quack

3 of 3 adjective
  • A lot of it was presented to the public as the personal quirks of Medinsky, who is this kind of quack revisionist historian.
    — Isaac Chotiner, New Yorker, 18 Sep. 2025
  • What is quack medicine to the healthcare mainstream is, nonetheless, getting enshrined as a treatment option by antiabortion activist lawmakers.
    — WIRED, 6 Sep. 2022
  • But when a patient recognizes him from his dangerous past, Brown has eight hours to elude the government, mob hitmen, quack surgeons, and a trail of dead gangers to beat the reaper somehow.
    — Rosy Cordero, Deadline, 18 Dec. 2025
  • This week, his campaign tossed on its social channels a video comparing a quack doctor on The Simpsons with Oz, who has faced serious questions about his credentials.
    — Philip Elliott, Time, 5 Oct. 2022
  • Even as evidence of the plague became incontrovertible, doctors continued to diagnose alternate illnesses and peddle quack remedies.
    — Sam Sacks, WSJ, 23 Sep. 2022
  • Anatomical studies face off with satires of quack doctors, watercolors of erupting volcanoes with cross-sections of slave ships; and if Enlightenment reason is found somewhat wanting, its philosophers also furnish us tools for its own critique.
    — Roberta Smith, New York Times, 15 Dec. 2022

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