as in detective
a person not on the police force who investigates criminal or illicit activity or searches for missing persons
the couple paid a gumshoe to look for their missing son
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Example Sentences
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Recent Examples of gumshoe
Alas, by then the cheese heiress has skipped the country, and one Mickey Finn later our gumshoe comes to consciousness aboard an eastbound ship on the Atlantic.
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Kathryn Schulz, New Yorker, 22 Sep. 2025
Chris Columbus, director of Home Alone and the first two Harry Potter films, helms the comedic caper, which follows an amiable gang of gumshoes who spend their golden years investigating cold cases.
—Randall Colburn, EW.com, 28 Aug. 2025
Io is a world-weary gumshoe who can see all the threads that bind mortals to their fates and uses this unusual perception to solve mysteries and crimes.
—John Wiswell, People.com, 3 July 2025
Greenspan’s elastic voice and ceaselessly expressive hands also turn him into Ulysses—a church organist from the Faulkner south whose fanatical devotion to Theda led him, like Iras, straight to her door—and into Detective Finale, Iras’s gumshoe father who’s on the case of their disappearance.
—Sara Holdren, Vulture, 14 Feb. 2024
See All Example Sentences for gumshoe
Recent Examples of Synonyms for gumshoe
Noun
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Nampa detectives eventually learned about Salat’s case in Ada County, where he originally was charged with three counts of lewd conduct with a child under 16, court records show.—
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Robert Marshall, lead homicide detective, added.—
Noun
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According to federal investigators, Neves Velente was responsible for both the Brown University mass shooting that killed two students and injured nine and the murder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nuno Loureiro, each of which occurred in December.—
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During the search, officials say that investigators found a series of short videos made by Neves Valente after the shootings.—
Cite this Entry
“Gumshoe.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/gumshoe. Accessed 13 Jan. 2026.
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