How to Use chain gang in a Sentence

chain gang

noun
Definition of chain gangnext
  • The origins of the law can be traced back to when chain gangs were common in the late 1920s.
    — Kathleen Joyce, Fox News, 7 June 2018
  • All day with the chain gang for 30 days, feed and clothe us and everything.
    — Claire Thornton, USA TODAY, 3 Nov. 2021
  • The white boys really turned the prison camp into a chain gang.
    — Winfred Rembert, The New Yorker, 3 May 2021
  • There were probably more good guys on the chain gang than bad.
    — Winfred Rembert, The New Yorker, 3 May 2021
  • Even Jughead, boy leader of a chain gang, is creeped out.
    — refinery29.com, 8 Mar. 2018
  • Hickmon, who had been handling the down marker as part of the three-man chain gang during the game, went to retrieve it.
    — Dallas News, 19 Aug. 2022
  • Kupp must be the greatest player ever because when the Rams don’t target him, the chain gang can snooze.
    — Tom Krasovic, San Diego Union-Tribune, 6 Nov. 2022
  • Godwin, who has a police court record, was sentenced to five months on the chain gang by Recorder Ivey this morning.
    — The Root, 3 Nov. 2017
  • Sloppy day for the chain gang, which was slow to change the down and distance markers, prompting a couple of play delays.
    — Jim McBride, BostonGlobe.com, 15 Aug. 2022
  • Convict Springs, which flows into the Suwannee River, was so named because in the 1900s, prison chain gangs working on road projects would set up camps there.
    — Vincent Crampton, OrlandoSentinel.com, 6 May 2018
  • Komie once had a client who had escaped a chain gang 25 years earlier and the governor declined to send him back to Mississippi.
    — Bruce Vielmetti, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 25 Sep. 2020
  • Unable to pay the fine, and with no support from those who benefitted from her bold advocacy, she was sentenced to a men’s chain gang.
    — Ashlee Marie Preston, Harper's BAZAAR, 8 Mar. 2021
  • The band members then spend the rest of the video trying to outrun fans, getting into a fight with a chain gang, speeding through a mini market and even jumping off a roof to evade capture.
    — Starr Bowenbank, Billboard, 25 Jan. 2023
  • One idea: Use real chain gangs, prisoners chained together at the ankles.
    — Scott Ostler, San Francisco Chronicle, 18 Dec. 2017
  • Two men of different races, who hate each other, escape from a chain gang shackled together.
    — Ed Stockly, Los Angeles Times, 2 Apr. 2021
  • The Saints coach strives for lasers instead of the chain gang to handle down and distance (basically goodbye to index cards determining a first down).
    — Larry Holder, NOLA.com, 28 Mar. 2018
  • Shortly after taking office in 2013, Ivey sought advice from Arpaio in Arizona and instituted a chain gang, in which jail inmates worked on the side of the road in striped uniforms.
    — NBC News, 19 Sep. 2020
  • Arpaio forced his prisoners to march in pink underwear, work in chain gangs, shower in boiling-hot water, and eat rotten food (the sheriff boasted about this last point).
    — Eric Levitz, Daily Intelligencer, 2 May 2018
  • Rustin, a prominent civil rights leader, spent 22 days working on a prison chain gang in Roxboro, North Carolina.
    — Meron Moges-Gerbi, CNN, 21 June 2022
  • In 1933, Langston Hughes wrote an essay on black incarceration for the Soviet edition of a novel about chain gangs.
    — Constance Grady, Vox, 27 July 2019
  • Fire rescue staff and deputies stood shoulder to shoulder and clustered in groups, as did a chain gang of half a dozen inmates wearing striped jumpsuits, orange trucker hats and chains clanking around their ankles.
    — Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon, USA TODAY, 27 Mar. 2020
  • The factory’s sweeper, Jim Conley, was sentenced to a year on a chain gang as an accessory to the murder, but no one else was ever convicted of killing Mary Phagan.
    — Leslie Camhi, Vogue, 21 Feb. 2023
  • Over decades, county sheriffs rounded up thousands of Black men with phony charges and trapped them in the convict leasing system – whose chain gangs were often run by former slave drivers.
    — Patrik Jonsson, The Christian Science Monitor, 2 June 2023
  • Rembert was born in Georgia, worked in cotton fields as a child, spent time in jail — including for civil-rights protests against Jim Crow segregation laws — served on a chain gang and survived a lynching attempt.
    — Christopher Arnott, Hartford Courant, 11 May 2022
  • Even though Schuster, in his trucker hat and sunglasses, looks more like a chain gang supervisor than a winemaker, business has been excellent.
    — Michael Alberty | For The Oregonian/oregonlive, oregonlive, 5 May 2020
  • In the mid-1990s, Fob James campaigned for a second term as governor on a law-and-order platform of school and prison reform that included support for corporal punishment and the reinstatement of chain gangs.
    — Anna Claire Vollers, AL.com, 11 Apr. 2018
  • While Bob Dylan is famous for inventing a rugged background for himself, and Lennon was a middle-class suburban kid singing about chain gangs and railroads in the Quarrymen, there were plenty of stars for whom hardship was a driving force.
    — Lavinia Greenlaw, WSJ, 22 Dec. 2017
  • His works include captions that spell out in rigorous detail the links between the incarceration of African-American men after the Civil War, chain gangs and inmate labor today.
    — Susannah Gardiner, Smithsonian, 23 Oct. 2017
  • These included ordering inmates to wear pink underwear, showing The Food Channel in the cafeteria (to make jest of prisoner's meals), and having prisoners work in chain gangs, including the only all-female one in the country.
    — Isabella Gomez, Teen Vogue, 10 Jan. 2018
  • For instance, the erotic, bluesy song that Conley performs with a chain gang is actually a quasi-confession, simultaneously gorgeous and appalling, particularly as sung by the astonishing Grayson.
    — Helen Shaw, The New Yorker, 16 Mar. 2023

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