How to Use paunchy in a Sentence

paunchy

adjective
  • There were paunchy men who penned letters tinged with sad, wry hopefulness.
    — Victoria Redel, New York Times, 4 Aug. 2017
  • There isn’t much room in this palette for public pools or paunchy, suburban retirees.
    — Sean Williams, Outside, 27 Oct. 2025
  • Rap Monster joins in with both a paunchy rap and a mellow singing verse that diverges from his usual role as a rapper.
    — Tamar Herman, Billboard, 16 June 2017
  • Since then, fame and riches have come quickly for the paunchy kid with the killer punch from the border town of Imperial.
    — Tim Arango, New York Times, 16 June 2019
  • But like the man himself, Assassin’s Creed is growing old — and getting paunchy with age.
    — Chris Kohler, WIRED, 14 Nov. 2011
  • One recent late afternoon, a group of paunchy middle-aged men seated in plastic chairs on the sidewalk debated measures to fight the virus.
    — Renata Brito, Anchorage Daily News, 26 May 2020
  • At 48, Hawke was dissolute, his pretty-boy charm replaced with the bullish aggression of paunchy middle age.
    — Graeme Wood, The Atlantic, 11 July 2019
  • The puzzled batter swings at the next pitch, grounds it to short, and is astonished to see the paunchy second-base umpire shifting to his right to field the ball, while the shortstop tries to coach his footwork.
    — Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 4 Apr. 2020
  • In the decades when the Congress party dominated politics, paunchy politicians moved into colonial-era bungalows and travelled first class.
    — The Economist, 24 Oct. 2019
  • If coolness denotes — or once denoted — a certain indifference to what people think, then these middle-aged mothers with their silly, adorable shtick and their paunchy husbands are perhaps the only cool people left on our try-hard planet.
    — Carina Chocano, New York Times, 20 Nov. 2019
  • Gozali, a paunchy Chinese-Indonesian with a penchant for American hamburgers, is perhaps an unlikely apostle for sports and fitness.
    — Jon Emont, New York Times, 17 May 2017
  • But then came Know Your Enemy, an awkward record that aimed to recapture the punk ethos of the Richey years; listening to it was gruesomely compelling, like watching a paunchy thirty-five-year old try to pull on an old pair of jeans.
    — Longreads, 25 June 2019
  • In Arthur Penn’s 1975 neo-noir Night Moves, Griffith is Delly Grastner, a 16-year-old runaway with a little girl’s voice and a grown woman’s body—on full display in an underwater nude scene—intent on seducing Gene Hackman, 43 and paunchy.
    — Lili Anolik, Vanity Fair, 12 Jan. 2026

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