How to Use fatuous in a Sentence

fatuous

adjective
  • That’s a self-portrait that has long been fatuous in the extreme.
    — Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 3 Nov. 2023
  • Molière is not our contemporary in some facile and fatuous way.
    — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 1 Feb. 2022
  • Weil neatly disarmed this fatuous attempt to portray him as an academic with his head in the clouds.
    — Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 20 July 2021
  • He’s expected to rule any day now on a fatuous lawsuit brought by antiabortion activists.
    — Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 6 Mar. 2023
  • His play, which might have been smashed by the insensitive or botched by the fatuous, has fallen into expert hands.
    — Claudia Cassidy, Chicago Tribune, 19 May 2022
  • Gotti’s lawyer labored hard to make something of the fatuous hypocrisy that secured the government’s case.
    — Howard Blum, The Hive, 1 Dec. 2017
  • The ongoing war between woke and anti-woke factions is a fatuous melodrama best left to the satirists.
    — Theater Critic, Los Angeles Times, 29 June 2026
  • Yet, it was followed, as his bloopers always are, by even more fatuous defamations aimed at the president from his critics.
    — Carl M. Cannon, Orange County Register, 26 Feb. 2017
  • Why not the antics of sly Elizabethan housewives playing tricks on a fatuous drunken roue?
    — Peter Marks, Washington Post, 22 Jan. 2020
  • This attitude need not be a fatuous hiding in the sand, denying realities.
    — Aimee Levitt, Chicago Reader, 29 June 2017
  • Many of these relationships are botched along the way, usually by new, fatuous directors.
    — Brian T. Allen, National Review, 1 Feb. 2024
  • Even the urban myth that billions of dollars of big-city transit subsidies are needed to help the poor and minorities is fatuous.
    — Stephen Moore, Washington Examiner, 27 Feb. 2020
  • Bush in order to scare people with his fatuous Hitler analogy, and the peace camp in order to scare people with the prospect of heavy losses.
    — Christian Lorentzen, Harper’s Magazine , 20 July 2022
  • In other words, McConnell is just engaging in fatuous blather.
    — Los Angeles Times, 23 Apr. 2020
  • Power doesn’t have to corrupt, the film suggests; many come to it precorrupted, as well as ignorant, fatuous and heedless.
    — Joe Morgenstern, WSJ, 8 Mar. 2018
  • Schwentke’s attempt to create a parable of the decline of the American empire seems mainly forced and fatuous.
    — Stephen Farber, The Hollywood Reporter, 20 Feb. 2023
  • The Old Sincerity pointed out everything fatuous the boss said.
    — Peter W. Kaplan and Peter Stevenson, Esquire, 4 Apr. 2014
  • Co-starring Chris Tucker, as the soldiers’ agent, and Steve Martin, as a fatuous tycoon.
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 10 Jan. 2017
  • But Daumier always finds some element of the ridiculous, the fatuous, the smug, even in the poets, writers and critics among his subjects.
    — Washington Post, 7 Oct. 2020
  • The choice for Howland thus becomes one between the vulnerability of the inmate and the brusque, fatuous bullying of the keeper.
    — Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 5 Jan. 2021
  • Voters should be infuriated — and terrified —that politicians with this fatuous take on how to fight the virus, much less how to manage our economy, might end up in charge of our government.
    — Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 10 Aug. 2021
  • Webcams, those seeing-eye gadgets that plug into PCs, are almost as numerous as fatuous dot-com TV ads.
    — Gareth Branwyn, WIRED, 1 Apr. 2000
  • There, the Department of Justice has chosen to declare much of the act unconstitutional, on flagrantly fatuous grounds.
    — Michael Hiltzik, latimes.com, 9 July 2018
  • As translated by the director and screenwriter Billy Ray, this is instead a slo-mo horror story, in which the worst lack all inhibition while the best are full of fatuous integrity.
    — James Poniewozik, New York Times, 24 Sep. 2020
  • Lost in an endless game of IP-reshuffling musical chairs, Barry realizes, possibly too late, the futility of dwelling on the past — a fatuous lesson from a movie that can’t stop doing the same.
    — Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times, 15 June 2023
  • Not buying that fatuous distinction, Muriel, whom Molaskey handily makes the most complex character among a crowd of cartoons, offers a rebuttal in what may be the only ode to fact-checking ever written.
    — Jesse Green, New York Times, 6 Feb. 2024
  • Where the script and the production excel are in the scenes in Stephen’s office, where Rachel responds with understandable exasperation to her therapist’s seemingly fatuous questions and suggestions.
    — Ben Brantley, New York Times, 6 June 2017
  • The vice-president’s fatuous stunt on Sunday of showing up at an Indianapolis Colts game specifically in order to leave after an anthem protest was a pretty good indication that the president’s not going to let this go.
    — Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, 10 Oct. 2017
  • Keeping these films as relatively low-scale high-school capers (buoyed by Marvel’s fat visual-effects budget) has kept Holland’s hesitant, kind-hearted Spider-Man from seeming like a fatuous flagship star.
    — David Sims, The Atlantic, 27 June 2019

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