How to Use under-the-table in a Sentence

under-the-table

adjective
  • The old days of under-the-table cash payments to high school stars or secret gifts to their parents were over.
    — David Waldstein, New York Times, 27 Mar. 2025
  • All of the under-the-table deals are out in the open, generally speaking, and folks are upset.
    — Troy Renck, Denver Post, 18 July 2025
  • Garcia transmitted the cash in four installments and charged an under-the-table fee of $50 for each wire.
    — Jason Green, The Mercury News, 18 Jan. 2025
  • While migrants wait, many rely on public resources or take low-paying and unreliable, under-the-table gigs.
    — Hillary Chura, The Christian Science Monitor, 9 Jan. 2024
  • Transparency is certainly better than the open secret of under-the-table payments.
    — Steven P. Dinkin, San Diego Union-Tribune, 2 Apr. 2023
  • In contrast, a home office makes the window for such under-the-table information exchanges elusive.
    — Gleb Tsipursky, Fortune, 18 July 2023
  • Throughout high school, Ward honed in on dancing, booking under-the-table gigs and teaching classes to earn extra money.
    — Cydney Lee, Billboard, 13 Mar. 2023
  • Making tips explicitly tax free will help with this, and will also remove the stigma that has been associated with tips as under-the-table income.
    — Joe Moglia, Forbes, 11 Oct. 2024
  • Fewer than 10% of Syrian adults have work permits, with the rest being limited to informal, under-the-table jobs.
    — Scott McLean, CNN, 24 July 2024
  • But fast forward a few years those student-athletes no longer worry about being penalized for accepting under-the-table envelopes of cash from university boosters.
    — Andrea Williams, The Tennessean, 2 July 2025
  • Migrant child labor benefits both under-the-table operations and global corporations, the Times found.
    — Hannah Dreier, BostonGlobe.com, 25 Feb. 2023
  • The slimy ne’er-do-well Timo (Steven Yeun), who roped Mickey into the loan-shark snafu and had the same idea to run away into space, can’t stop making under-the-table deals.
    — Shirley Li, The Atlantic, 7 Mar. 2025
  • Migrant child labor benefits both under-the-table operations and global corporations, The Times found.
    — Photographs Kirsten Luce, New York Times, 25 Feb. 2023
  • Jim Larrañaga could handle—and repeatedly thrived—in the old college sports system, where athletes could only get paid under-the-table, even if that meant the Feds might subpoena his text messages.
    — Daniel Libit, Sportico.com, 26 Dec. 2024
  • As alluded to previously, many athletes accepted under-the-table payments from schools (and their partners) who knew their contributions have a meaningful impact on their (and their partners’) bottom line.
    — Nick Lomaglio, Forbes.com, 29 Aug. 2025
  • The most common job for these children is under-the-table work in roofing and construction, according to teachers, social workers, labor organizers and federal investigators.
    — Hannah Dreier, New York Times, 14 Dec. 2023
  • The corruption trial kicked off in 2020, with prosecutors accusing Netanyahu of exchanging regulatory favors for positive press coverage in under-the-table dealings with media moguls.
    — Anders Hagstrom, Fox News, 29 Dec. 2024
  • In 2018, after media accounts revealed one such donor’s under-the-table contributions to an Australian senator—who then provided countersurveillance advice to the Chinese donor—the senator was forced to resign his seat.
    — Philip Zelikow, Foreign Affairs, 9 June 2020
  • But while that under-the-table approach by Israel towards Hamas came crashing down with the October 7, 2023 attacks, concern still lingers in Ramallah, the headquarters of the PA , that the new technocratic committee could be another way to divide Palestinians by creating rival centers of power.
    — Andrew Carey, CNN Money, 18 Jan. 2026

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