linchpin
noun
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In his 1857 novel, Tom Brown’s School Days, Thomas Hughes describes the “cowardly” custom of “taking the linch-pins out of the farmers’ and bagmens’ gigs at the fairs.” The linchpin in question held the wheel on the carriage, and removing it made it likely that the wheel would come off as the vehicle moved. Such a pin was called a lynis in Old English; Middle English speakers added pin to form lynspin. By the early 20th century, English speakers were using linchpin for anything as critical to a complex situation as a linchpin is to a wagon, as when Winston Churchill, in 1930, wrote of Canada and the role it played in the relationship between Great Britain and the United States, that “no state, no country, no band of men can more truly be described as the linchpin of peace and world progress.”
Examples of linchpin in a Sentence
Connor Giffin, The Courier-Journal, 9 July 2025
Now, however, the claim that the U.S. is under invasion has become the legal linchpin of President Donald Trump’s sweeping anti-immigrant campaign.
—Molly Redden, ProPublica, 23 May 2025
Meanwhile, Nvidia, whose high-end GPUs power almost every leading AI model, has become a geopolitical linchpin.
—Shannon Carroll, Quartz, 22 May 2025
Solid spending has been one of the linchpins keeping the economy out of a recession, but part of May’s drop may simply have been a return to more normal trends.
—Stan Choe, Los Angeles Times, 17 June 2025
See All Example Sentences for linchpin
Cite this Entry
“Linchpin.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/linchpin. Accessed 21 Jul. 2025.
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linchpin
noun
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