shoehorn
Americannoun
verb (used with object)
noun
verb
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of shoehorn
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
It is no mean feat to shoehorn a half-millennium of social, political and economic tumult into a single volume.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 14, 2025
What Elon Musk Thought has in common with earlier techno-futurist disasters is the attempt to shoehorn that messiness and complexity into a more “efficient” monoculture to achieve his utopian vision.
From Salon ● Apr. 27, 2025
I'm a big Marcus Smith fan but there is no room to shoehorn people in at international level.
From BBC ● Feb. 23, 2025
But longtime “Wicked” fans will notice that the movie doesn’t drastically shoehorn any part of the narrative.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 22, 2024
"That guy David from Rahway? He ever killed anybody with that shoehorn?"
From "Miracle's Boys" by Jacqueline Woodson
Anthropic's advertisement broadcast during last week's Super Bowl showed a man asking advice from a conversational AI, which then shoehorns advertising copy for a dating site into its otherwise relevant response.
From Barron's ● Feb. 15, 2026
And in recent years, the oftentimes absurd incursion of loanwoards has become satirized in popular culture, with speech that needlessly shoehorns English in at every turn pejoratively referred to as “voguespeak” or “Pangyo dialect.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 3, 2025
Lacey also shoehorns a funny lament about health insurance into her endnotes.
From New York Times ● Mar. 20, 2023
It is a shame the film shoehorns so much of the book into two hours.
From Salon ● Jul. 15, 2022
And so the film shoehorns in an almost admirably ludicrous explanation for her lack of regard for canine lives, which is to depict a trio of Dalmatians pushing her mother off a balcony.
From Washington Post ● May 28, 2021
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
