Word.ws English Dictionary

pretention

pretention is the archaic spelling of pretension.

Meaning of pretension

Noun

pretension (countable and uncountable, plural pretensions)

  1. A claim or aspiration to a particular status or quality.
    • As a foreign stamp gazette it is nowhere. An article on Stamp Collecting, by J. E. Gray, “reprinted from one of his books,” and a catalogue of stamps constitute its sole attraction. We are surprised to find such sounding pretentions so poorly supported.1872, “Reviews of Postal Publications”, in The Stamp-Collector's Magazine, volume 10, page 110
  2. Pretentiousness.

See all 4 meanings of pretension

Forms of pretention

pluralpretentions

Questions about pretention

What is pretention the archaic spelling of?
Pretention is the archaic spelling of pretension.

Words near pretention in the dictionary

  1. pretensions
  2. pretensive
  3. pretensively
  4. pretensiveness
  5. pretentative
  6. pretention
  7. pretentions
  8. pretentiosity
  9. pretentious
  10. pretentiously
  11. pretentiousness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pretention (page history and authors); pretension (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.

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