Adjective: pretentious
Comparison Forms
Synthetic
Perifrastic
| Comparative | more pretentious |
| Superlative | most pretentious |
Sample Sentences
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Her dress was obviously more pretentious than comfortable.
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I recall the height of comfort attained by the green-cushioned "first" with starched white antimacassars and a pretentious grey floor mat on which it seemed a sacrilege to stand, as it was embellished with the North Western conception of Britannia, complete with trident. [1951 October 26, R. S. McNaught, “Lines of Approach”, in Railway Magazine, pages 703–704:]
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Their song titles are pretentious in the context of their basic lyrics.
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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. [2023 January 11, Stephen Roberts, “Bradshaw's Britain: castles and cathedrals”, in RAIL, number 974, page 56:]
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... the first definite and pretentious attempt to make the wardrobe trunk a commercial possibility ... The new trunk would be exploited direct to the traveling public, and he had the means for a pretentious start. [1917 January 26, “Season 1917”, in Trunks, Leather Goods, and Umbrellas, volume 39, number 1, page 54:]
Adjectives inflected like pretentious
priest-ridden,
unreposed,
evadible,
dissentious,
dissentient,
unforesighted,
egocentrical,
unephemeral,
unennobling,
mensuralist,
flocculent,
unseductive,
whoopsy,
whooshy,
surrogate,
Nicodian,
unrepaired,
prismatoidal,
renorenal,
unseducible, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)
Etymology
1. From French prétentieux, from prétention, from Latin praetēnsus (“false or hypocritical profession”), past participle of praetendō.
2. 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. See: French Adjectives '
prétentieux'.
Verbs referencing "pretentious"
Polish Adjectives
pretensjonalny.