How to Use sophistry in a Sentence

sophistry

noun
  • Giving up on the truth, then as now, means that we’re left with nothing but sophistry.
    — Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, WSJ, 15 Mar. 2018
  • Larry Poland dismissed it as sophistry.
    — Isaac Butler, New Yorker, 30 May 2026
  • Fascism creates a world of artifice and sophistry.
    — Literary Hub, 27 Apr. 2026
  • Some complain soccer is a chintzy distraction from the sophistry of our ruling classes.
    — Sean Williams, The New Republic, 10 July 2018
  • People know just enough to engage in sophistry so as to confuse and convince the choir, and bluster among the ignorant.
    — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 15 Sep. 2013
  • Like pretty much everything Hof says, the hard line between what is science and what is sophistry is slippery.
    — Rachel Sugar, Bon Appétit, 28 Oct. 2019
  • All of whom flock to Monsignor Wicks, drawn by his sophistry and fearsome bully-pulpit magnetism.
    — Damon Wise, Deadline, 6 Sep. 2025
  • The explanation is that the opponents of the law are blinded by a sort of opportunistic sophistry.
    — Amy Davidson Sorkin, The New Yorker, 10 Nov. 2020
  • The lawsuit is an exercise in legal sophistry with potentially grave consequences.
    — Jon Healey, Star Tribune, 2 Oct. 2020
  • No doubt the sophistries of elite Charlestonians, so thoroughly intertwined with the defense of Jim Crow, were becoming clear to Waring as well.
    — Joseph Crespino, WSJ, 18 Jan. 2019
  • After such smug sophistry, Stevenson and McMillan do a brotherly fist bump that Cresson clumsily frames behind a pitcher of water.
    — Armond White, National Review, 24 Jan. 2020
  • The central irony of U2’s career might be that, having become sophisticated critics of media sophistry, the band simplified its outlook just before 9/11.
    — Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker, 8 Aug. 2021
  • And blunt is the racial preference, the explicit segregation, the insulting assumption-making and the overall intellectual sophistry that is anti-racist ideology in action.
    — The New York Times, Arkansas Online, 30 June 2021
  • That December, Navarro published the first of three pseudo-scholarly reports, filled with sophistry about voter fraud (drop boxes, mail-in ballots), to argue that Joe Biden’s decisive victory was likely illegitimate.
    — Ian Parker, New Yorker, 22 Dec. 2025
  • Further, Plato’s disdain for Gorgias, Antisthenes’ first teacher, and sophistry in general is clear; in the Platonic dialogue Gorgias, the titular character is made out to be rather foolish.
    — Theodore McDarrah, Forbes.com, 26 June 2026

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