Word.ws English Dictionary

pretensive

pretensive adjective: pretended; feigned.

Adjective

pretensive (comparative more pretensive, superlative most pretensive)

  1. (archaic) Pretended; feigned.
  2. (US) Pretentious.
    • I used half a lifetime reading the critics, and while I found the content pretensive I found the style somehow pleasurable […].1967, Charles Bukowski, letter, in On Writing, Canongate 2016, p. 95

Forms of pretensive

comparativemore pretensive
superlativemost pretensive

Origin of pretensive

From the participle stem of Latin praetendere + -ive.

Words formed from pretensive

Questions about pretensive

What does pretensive mean?
Pretensive means pretended; feigned.
What part of speech is pretensive?
Pretensive is an adjective.

Words near pretensive in the dictionary

  1. pretensioner
  2. pretensioners
  3. pretensioning
  4. pretensionless
  5. pretensions
  6. pretensive
  7. pretensively
  8. pretensiveness
  9. pretentative
  10. pretention
  11. pretentions

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pretensive (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “pretensive.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pretensive. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.