mountebank

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

Mencken described Bryan as “a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity.”

From Salon • Jan. 25, 2024

“Some dreadful mountebank in a long-tailed coat will open . . . with a windy speech; then another mountebank will repeat the same rubbish in other words.”

From The New Yorker • Jun. 27, 2016

The resulting installations, at once intimate and subversive, polarized the critics: Some dismissed Mr. Burden as a mountebank, while others praised his explorations of masculinity, martyrdom and the Romantic ideal of suffering for one’s art.

From New York Times • May 11, 2015

"There before me was a frightful gnome with red-rimmed eyes and no eyelashes, no hair, greenish teeth, bad breath, the manners of a mountebank and the reputation, nevertheless, for being a ladies' man."

From The Guardian • Feb. 4, 2013

Was it not a dangerous word, too closely connected to Hobbes and to dubious stories about sympathetic magic told by Digby—someone whom John Evelyn, another early member, could dismiss as an arrant mountebank?

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton