How to Use panopticon in a Sentence

panopticon

noun
  • Whether that place seems like a pleasure-dome or a panopticon is up to you.
    — Max Norman, New Yorker, 25 June 2026
  • The result, if all goes well, may be the world’s first true panopticon.
    — The Economist, 11 June 2020
  • The panopticon lives inside the house.
    — Olivia Crandall, Vulture, 13 Nov. 2025
  • The best way to prevent a financial panopticon is to not build it at all.
    — Alexander William Salter, WSJ, 5 Oct. 2021
  • Which, of course, is the intent behind the creation of this kind of panopticon.
    — Jennifer Wright, refinery29.com, 6 Sep. 2021
  • Cities are the most potent nodes of this global animal panopticon.
    — Ross Andersen, The Atlantic, 7 Sep. 2025
  • There are only eight panopticons of this style known to exist in the world today, three of which can be found at Pentridge.
    — Camille Fine, USA TODAY, 2 May 2023
  • In its worst sense, the home office can become a sort of panopticon with supervision enforced on all sides.
    — Jelena Radonjic, Forbes, 7 Dec. 2021
  • His early life is thoroughly archived, thanks to growing up under the eyes of an online panopticon that spares no one.
    — Brian Hiatt, Rolling Stone, 18 Nov. 2024
  • The many eyes of our everyday panopticon recorded the event from multiple angles.
    — Elizabeth Bruenig, The Atlantic, 10 Jan. 2026
  • How strong might the normative effect be with the panopticon effect—the feeling someone just might be watching?
    — David Rock, Forbes, 6 May 2021
  • If there is one constituency that will appreciate the introduction of a wealth tax, it is made up of fans of the panopticon state.
    — Andrew Stuttaford, National Review, 3 Mar. 2021
  • This ability to be remotely present in these crises is also a product of the panopticon, the surveillance state.
    — David Wallace, The New Yorker, 23 Nov. 2020
  • In that scene, Wharton’s New York is a panopticon no resident can escape.
    — Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic, 27 Jan. 2022
  • The constant presence of video cameras can turn our streets and homes into weird panopticons, my colleague Drew Harwell wrote.
    — Tatum Hunter, Washington Post, 29 Feb. 2024
  • More problematic, no one loves a panopticon, as seen in anti-proctoring petitions and protests.
    — Ryan Craig, Forbes, 6 Jan. 2023
  • Spaceship Neptune’s swanky, pressurized lounge is a panopticon of windows and includes a bar and bathroom.
    — Michael Verdon, Robb Report, 5 Sep. 2021
  • The bubble courts are a sort of pandemic panopticon powered by Microsoft Teams.
    — Nicolás Rivero, Quartz, 14 Aug. 2020
  • Yasmin, in particular, is surrounded by the panopticon of phone cameras, from passersby as well as paparazzi.
    — Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker, 7 Aug. 2024
  • Today, the future of work looks increasingly like a digital panopticon.
    — Sarita Gupta, Time, 2 June 2026
  • These might seem like separate systems, and therefore different from the kind of centralized panopticon imagined in the pulp sci-fi our parents might have read.
    — Joe Wilkins, Futurism, 29 Apr. 2026
  • Her social media panopticon is already in so many ways bigger than the 600 movie theaters that an independent film might play in.
    — Nate Freeman, Vanity Fair, 11 Mar. 2026
  • The filming devices in the home establish a panopticon where the husband and children are pawns in an advertising campaign for the woman’s self-image.
    — Abigail Anthony, National Review, 11 Feb. 2024
  • Even the panopticon quality that feels so weighted toward the White Spoons gets a radical readjustment.
    — Roxana Hadadi, Vulture, 7 Oct. 2024
  • Very weird all around, but what IS a normal way to react to your body being turned into a panopticon run by your psychotic billionaire husband?
    — Jessica Goldstein, Vulture, 15 Apr. 2021
  • Forever 21–meets–Bentham’s panopticon compound in Spain — is best suited for the topic at hand.
    — Curbed, 21 July 2022
  • Private, unregulated space has now been breached and is in the process of being transformed into a space of surveillance and control — a kind of digital panopticon.
    — Carina Chocano, New York Times, 1 Oct. 2020
  • Many of the fragments spreading through the digital panopticon comprise real footage of real events, but their cumulative effect is far from a cogent portrait.
    — Kyle Chayka, New Yorker, 11 Mar. 2026
  • But the parental panopticon is not a mark of maturity and responsibility but rather of paranoia, distrust, and devolvement.
    — Cyd Harrell, Wired, 20 Dec. 2021
  • All the girls’ rooms were upstairs, opening off a balcony that circled a large inner courtyard, so everyone could see everyone, a panopticon nobody wanted in ugly cream vinyl tile.
    — Literary Hub, 15 Oct. 2025

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