How to Use gotcha in a Sentence

gotcha

noun
  • The program has a few gotchas in store for unsuspecting computer users.
  • And the people who want to do gotchas on me only show the first part.
    — David Wallace-Wells, New York Times, 24 Apr. 2023
  • In the game of gotcha, this breastfeeding mom just won.
    — Lisa Gutierrez, kansascity, 8 Aug. 2017
  • Now the press has its gotcha, and it’s Donald Trump Jr. Golly.
    — Holman W. Jenkins, WSJ, 14 July 2017
  • Everyone makes mistakes — and the point is not to play gotcha.
    — Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, 17 Jan. 2018
  • This can feel like a gotcha for customers who are not fully aware of how roaming works.
    — David Kravets, WIRED, 20 July 2007
  • There’s no way out when the media play this game of social-justice/systemic-racist gotcha.
    — Armond White, National Review, 20 Sep. 2024
  • But these offerings also come with gotchas of their own.
    — Rob Pegoraro, USA TODAY, 29 June 2019
  • This assumes subscribers are using the right kinds of phones — and that’s another gotcha, for now.
    — Julio Ojeda-Zapata, Twin Cities, 4 Dec. 2019
  • Quite a few people flagged her tweet as a gotcha, but there was nothing surprising about it.
    — Kyle Smith, National Review, 25 Jan. 2021
  • The point of the agency is not a game of gotcha to try to criminally prosecute people.
    — Melissa Quinn, CBS News, 8 Oct. 2024
  • So, what are the biggest gotchas for vacation rental customers?
    — Christopher Elliott, USA TODAY, 18 Oct. 2024
  • The final gotcha—when Malcolm at long last realizes his true fate—is well-earned and, as far as twists go, Shyamalan's best work.
    — Megan McCluskey, TIME, 1 Aug. 2024
  • The problem is that during the getting up-to-speed time, there might be inadvertent gotchas or hiccups that arise.
    — Lance Eliot, Forbes, 11 Oct. 2024
  • This new wireless-data offering comes with a few gotchas.
    — Julio Ojeda-Zapata, Twin Cities, 18 July 2019
  • The action of being frenetic and trying to search for your legally winning gotcha was old hat.
    — Lance Eliot, Forbes, 19 Feb. 2024
  • The wraparound cockpit screens make a lot of information available, but there’s one gotcha.
    — James Morris, Fortune Europe, 6 Oct. 2024
  • Carefully paced and totally harrowing, this one’s for fans of the slow burn who also pray to the horror gods for a gotcha from a demon.
    — New York Times, 15 Aug. 2019
  • Another gotcha in the above fine print: This card (and many others) pays loss-of-use only if verified by the rental company’s log.
    — Ed Perkins, USA TODAY, 26 Oct. 2017
  • We may be too obsessed with gotcha questions and viral moments to understand the contours of this opening-gun event.
    — Walter Shapiro, The New Republic, 27 June 2019
  • The whole enterprise speaks to a mind-set more about political gotcha than journalism.
    — Erik Wemple, Washington Post, 20 Sep. 2022
  • These require more than sound bites, more than a base-energizing gotcha or two, and more than familiar promises.
    — Baltimore Sun Editorial Board, Baltimore Sun, 25 June 2024
  • Greece gotcha: The Sea Turtles hacking group breached Greece's top level domain registrar.
    — Jeff John Roberts, Fortune, 13 July 2019
  • But the biggest gotcha is likely to be a detail that many consumers are overlooking in their eagerness to bank the payment: The pool of money to fund the payments is topped at $31 million.
    — Aimee Picchi, CBS News, 10 Sep. 2019
  • In a movie world of bantamweight scares, designed primarily to get you to the next gotcha, writer-director Ari Aster is an outlier.
    — Michael Phillips, chicagotribune.com, 25 June 2019
  • Claire and Jack rush into her home office expecting something awful, but gotcha!
    — Jean Bentley, refinery29.com, 4 May 2020
  • These include the Latina Lesbians series, portraits paired with handwritten personal statements of strength and dignity, the best of which has the gotcha air of a Virginia Slims ad from the era.
    — Lori Waxman, chicagotribune.com, 22 July 2019
  • But his dependence on the gotcha has marred his filmography, leaving the filmmaker with a spotty track record himself.
    — Tim Grierson, Los Angeles Times, 6 Aug. 2024
  • Anti-American nihilism and hopeless racial cynicism give the show its gotcha.
    — Armond White, National Review, 26 Aug. 2020
  • Further, challenges remain in the areas of regulatory, ground and airspace infrastructure and a host of other design and market gotchas that must be addressed.
    — Brian Foley, Forbes, 15 Jan. 2025

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