Word of the Day:
pretense
What It Means
The action of pretending; false or simulated show or appearance; false or hypocritical assertion or representation.
Affectation or ostentation of manner.
Intention or purpose not real but professed.
"Lady Little", the title that she used, was just a pretense.
Pretense in Context
“They wished to demask hidden metaphysics, to demask the false pretenses of sentences purportively descriptive but de facto metaphysical or evaluative.”
Did You Know?
Borrowed from Middle French pretensse, from Late Latin praetēnsus, past participle of Latin praetendō (“to pretend”), from prae- (“before”) + tendō (“to stretch”); see pretend.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: pretense (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “pretense.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pretense. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.