How to Use hobgoblin in a Sentence

hobgoblin

noun
  • The witches used some as nests, too, leaving them for hobgoblins to sleep in.
    — New York Times, 21 May 2018
  • The primrose path to relevance has been strewn with injuries and other baseball hobgoblins.
    — Richard Fitch, Cincinnati.com, 27 Apr. 2018
  • Powell & Co are now eyeing consumer service prices as the latest hobgoblin to hound.
    — Gary Drenik, Forbes, 19 Dec. 2022
  • This was another fates-or-hobgoblins turn of events, but many Americans took that profound luck as their rightful due.
    — Daniel Immerwahr, New Yorker, 4 May 2026
  • God has His own Treblinka, with devils, hobgoblins, demons, angels of death.
    — Ben Taub, The New Yorker, 30 Apr. 2018
  • Nothing says Happy Halloween like a scary hobgoblin, all scowls and just looking for trouble.
    — Woman's Day Staff, Woman's Day, 9 Sep. 2019
  • Because consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, or something.
    — Tory Newmyer, Washington Post, 17 Oct. 2017
  • Resistance is the hobgoblin of antiviral medicine, even with antivirals as effective as Paxlovid.
    — Jason Mast, STAT, 29 May 2022
  • Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote.
    — Robert Krier, sandiegouniontribune.com, 7 June 2018
  • This fascination tells us more about ourselves than Sosa, who is demonstrating that foolish consistency said to be the hobgoblin of little minds.
    — Phil Rosenthal, chicagotribune.com, 29 June 2018
  • Evidently, consistency really is the hobgoblin of small minds—the heirs to Scalia and Robert Bork don’t bother themselves with it.
    — John Cassidy, The New Yorker, 26 June 2022
  • In another fates-or-hobgoblins moment, a discombobulated Washington had started a war.
    — Daniel Immerwahr, New Yorker, 4 May 2026
  • The narrative unfolds communally around a table, with plenty of backtracking, retconning, and joking—and avoiding the small-minded hobgoblins of consistency and rules-lawyering.
    — Ethan Gilsdorf, WIRED, 27 June 2023
  • Such hobgoblins of Hamilton’s imagination bear an eerie resemblance to the current occupant of the White House, with his tweets, double talk and inflammatory rhetoric at rallies.
    — Ron Chernow, Twin Cities, 21 Oct. 2019
  • Start with the ostensible foreground — perhaps a lunch or a visit from a svelte refrigerator repairman or a recipe for lemon drizzle cake — then introduce the emotional hobgoblins that throw the characters rewardingly off-kilter.
    — Elinor Lipman, New York Times, 2 June 2017

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