Word of the Day:
pretentious
What It Means
Motivated by an inappropriate, excessive, or unjustified desire to impress others.
Marked by an unwarranted claim to importance or distinction.
Marked by pretense (not necessarily false pretense); intent upon success; ambitious.
Their song titles are pretentious in the context of their basic lyrics.
Pretentious in Context
“The station (1840) was originally Cheltenham but the more grandiose Cheltenham Spa since 1925, which feels a bit pretentious as the town has never allowed itself to assume such airs and graces.”
Did You Know?
From French prétentieux, from prétention, from Latin praetēnsus (“false or hypocritical profession”), past participle of praetendō. Note that pretentious is spelled with a ‘t’, unlike related pretense, pretension. This is due to the French spelling: *-sious does not occur as an English suffix, though -sion and -tion both do.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: pretentious (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: “pretentious.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pretentious. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
