How to Use bootleg in a Sentence

bootleg

1 of 2 noun
  • She was arrested for selling bootlegs online.
  • Tonight’s the Night shows for the past 50 years was via bootleg.
    — Andy Greene, Rolling Stone, 3 Mar. 2023
  • Murray kept the ball on the play for a two-yard touchdown on a naked bootleg.
    — Matt Young, Chron, 12 Sep. 2021
  • Nolan keeps it on a bootleg to the right, and the two-point conversion is good.
    — oregonlive, 30 Oct. 2021
  • What’s certain is that his bootleg hustle ended with prison time.
    — Aamir Khollam, Interesting Engineering, 12 Sep. 2025
  • At 12, a friend lent him a bootleg rave tape and that changed everything.
    — Alison Coleman, Forbes, 17 Oct. 2021
  • The film, which was never released, has a cult following through bootlegs.
    — Jada Yuan, Washington Post, 6 Sep. 2023
  • And that means passing up scramble lanes on bootlegs and dirting the ball in the face of free rushers.
    — Nate Atkins, New York Times, 1 Oct. 2025
  • Preparing for rollouts and bootlegs means flipping the field.
    — Christopher Price, BostonGlobe.com, 13 Sep. 2023
  • Watch a bootleg filmed with a handheld camera by someone in a movie theater.
    — Sara Lautman, The New Yorker, 9 Nov. 2020
  • Their ability to make plays on the ground will allow for bootleg and read-option looks.
    — oregonlive, 3 May 2020
  • There was this sort of illicit thrill of listening to Smile bootlegs back then.
    — Andy Greene, Rolling Stone, 19 Feb. 2024
  • There’s a lot of bootleg material out there.
    — Mike Fleming Jr, Deadline, 5 Sep. 2025
  • Why the Browns aren’t running as much bootleg as in previous weeks.
    — Matt Goul, cleveland, 10 Jan. 2021
  • There are versions of those films out there, and there’s a lot of bootleg material out there.
    — Mike Fleming Jr, Deadline, 5 Sep. 2025
  • The Browns need to figure out what to do when their play-action, bootleg game gets taken away.
    — cleveland, 17 Oct. 2020
  • Over and over again, Chicago tried to find some breathing room with play action and bootleg plays.
    — Luke Johnson, NOLA.com, 12 Jan. 2021
  • The play design called for Fields to run a naked bootleg off play action with Mooney as his first read.
    — Dan Wiederer, chicagotribune.com, 21 Dec. 2021
  • Zach Norris called a bootleg option and gained 8 yards to the 15.
    — Craig Clary, baltimoresun.com, 26 Mar. 2021
  • Some even laid out tables of bootleg Kanye T-shirts, caps and sweatshirts with his name and face on them.
    — New York Times, 6 Aug. 2021
  • Then, Hipa ran bootleg for the two-point conversion to send the game into overtime.
    — Richard Obert, The Arizona Republic, 11 Dec. 2021
  • Then Ramsey capped it with a fourth-and-goal 1-yard TD run on a naked bootleg.
    — Chris Solari, USA TODAY, 29 Nov. 2020
  • Montana ran a bootleg around right end and wasn’t touched on a 5-yard score, the first rushing touchdown of his career.
    — Eric Branch, SFChronicle.com, 29 Sep. 2020
  • There’s also a vast, vast world of Radiohead concert bootlegs to explore.
    — Andy Greene, Rolling Stone, 27 Sep. 2025
  • On third-and-2, Salter kept it on a bootleg and rolled into trouble again, throwing the ball away.
    — Andrew Hughes, MSNBC Newsweek, 30 Aug. 2025
  • Luhrmann spent two years hunting the audio tapes — even buying bootleg recordings — and syncing them with the film footage.
    — Lisa Gutierrez, Kansas City Star, 3 Mar. 2026
  • His strengths as a rhythm passer and his ability to operate on bootlegs align cleanly with that system.
    — Rowan Fisher-Shotton, MSNBC Newsweek, 31 Mar. 2026
  • The bootleg audio has made the rounds, but seeing George do this is a new experience.
    — Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone, 29 Nov. 2021
  • Now, people who don’t have a technical understanding, there might be bootlegs, but that is scratchy stuff with not very good sound.
    — Mike Fleming Jr, Deadline, 5 Sep. 2025
  • Allen’s 11-yard touchdown run on a naked bootleg evened the score, which held until the game’s final minutes.
    — Jonas Shaffer, Baltimore Sun, 2 Oct. 2022

bootleg

2 of 2 verb
  • He bootlegged the show and gave copies to several friends.
  • Or maybe some seconds or some minutes have been bootlegged.
    — Chris Willman, Variety, 23 Feb. 2026
  • Many people have a tale of trying to bootleg an iPhone repair.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 26 Mar. 2020
  • It has rarely been screened in theaters and never released for home video, but it has been widely bootlegged.
    — Randy Lewis, Los Angeles Times, 3 Aug. 2019
  • Old albums were unearthed, bootlegged, and reissued.
    — Hanif Abdurraqib, New Yorker, 6 Feb. 2026
  • It was bought on DVD and passed around and probably bootlegged and passed around some more.
    — Joshua St. Clair, Men's Health, 24 Mar. 2023
  • There’s also a vast, vast world of Radiohead concert bootlegs to explore.
    — Andy Greene, Rolling Stone, 27 Sep. 2025
  • But the extras still include a wealth of alternate early takes and demos that have mostly never been released or bootlegged before.
    — Chris Willman, chicagotribune.com, 8 Aug. 2019
  • In Chicago, as in other major cities, a few high-profile mobsters battled it out for bootlegging supremacy.
    — Sarah Holzmann, Smithsonian Magazine, 14 Feb. 2025
  • At the same time, Olson and his bootlegging compatriots entered town and were warned of the marshals’ movements.
    — David Reamer, Anchorage Daily News, 1 June 2020
  • Most of their neighbors were inside tents, playing video games or watching movies on their cellphones, electricity bootlegged from a city utility box.
    — Los Angeles Times, 15 Aug. 2019
  • The quarterback can bootleg in and out of the perimeter of cameras, as the testing aims to simulate as many football movements as possible.
    — Jourdan Rodrigue, The Athletic, 27 Aug. 2024
  • After the songs were bootlegged for years, Coe began selling them on his website in 2000, though without his name on them.
    — Victoria Edel, PEOPLE, 30 Apr. 2026
  • As tweens, the sisters would spend hours at their grandmother’s atelier, where Nabila would bootleg American styles for them.
    — Tamar Adler, Vogue, 1 Mar. 2023
  • With a dual tape deck recorder, a duplicate copy of any cassette can be copied onto a blank tape, allowing for commercial recordings to be easily shared and bootlegged.
    — John Morrison, SPIN, 13 Feb. 2024
  • That makes the system much more sensitive, like recording a concert with multiple microphones, instead of one fan in the crowd bootlegging it with their smartphone.
    — Matt Simon, WIRED, 30 Nov. 2023
  • The faithful will remember that the rapper promised a concept double-album by this name, only pull it back, possibly in pique, after a version of it got leaked and bootlegged.
    — Chris Willman, Variety, 24 Nov. 2023
  • The next year in Iowa City, Long faked a handoff into the line and bootlegged around the right side untouched for a touchdown with barely any time left to lead No.
    — Scott Dochterman, ajc, 30 Sep. 2017
  • And the cartoons all look great on the app — a lot of this material is frequently bootlegged onto YouTube in inferior-looking versions.
    — Glenn Kenny, New York Times, 11 May 2017
  • Moonshine While moonshine may have bootlegging roots, the perfectly legal formula that exists today can be found at liquor stores and distilleries across the South.
    — Melinda Salchert, Southern Living, 29 Sep. 2025
  • Though demos of Waits’s Alice score were bootlegged for a decade after a CD was stolen from his car, the songs didn’t see proper release as an album until 2002.
    — Al Shipley, Spin, 3 Oct. 2023
  • Whether broadcast or bootlegged, Wild Style served as an introduction for kids around the world to a thriving, dynamic newfound American counterculture.
    — Vulture, 15 Sep. 2023
  • Newton got the linebackers and safeties to freeze on a fake to Jonathan Stewart, bootlegged to his left and dropped a pass to a wide-open Dickson, who rumbled for 57 yards before again being dragged down inside the 10.
    — Joseph Person, charlotteobserver, 9 Oct. 2017
  • Meanwhile, today’s nationalists are happy to demonize a China that bootlegs Mickey Mouse but are silent about the very same China that rounds up internal enemies and puts them in concentration camps.
    — Jonah Goldberg, National Review, 26 June 2019
  • Meanwhile, her two sons pursue legitimate work, but end up under the influence of Tom Egan and his criminal enterprises that eventually would include bootlegging during Prohibition.
    — Elizabeth Marie Himchak, San Diego Union-Tribune, 8 Oct. 2025

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