How to Use shoe-leather in a Sentence

shoe-leather

adjective
  • These projects often cross the line from cookbook to ethnography, buoyed by shoe-leather reporting overseas.
    — Jamie Feldmar, Saveur, 15 Apr. 2026
  • The other is Seymour Hersh, an investigative reporter/writer of the shoe-leather era, a throwback who is still at the admirable if frustrating business, fighting the good fight in an increasingly muddy media landscape.
    — Rick Kogan, Chicago Tribune, 13 Jan. 2026
  • No combination of stilettos and old-fashioned shoe-leather can temper the fact that integrity, talent, hard work, and a dedication to treating everything from fashion to the moving pictures with seriousness is in perpetual danger of extinction.
    — David Fear, Rolling Stone, 29 Apr. 2026
  • Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan credited old-school, shoe-leather policework with leading investigators to Kevin Lino, 38, as a suspect in the unsolved deaths of two men found dead more than a decade ago.
    — Matthew Medsger, Boston Herald, 5 Aug. 2025
  • The pair’s shoe-leather work in Austin — from the Longhorns’ DKR Stadium to other sites on the University of Texas campus, area churches and one rather significant bar — reveals as much about who Bailey might really be as what happened to her father.
    — Bob Strauss, San Francisco Chronicle, 13 Apr. 2023

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