pretentious
pre·ten·tious
adjective
making claim to or creating an appearance of (often undeserved) importance or distinction
- “a pretentious country house”
- “a pretentious fraud”
- “a pretentious scholarly edition”
Origin
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.
Phrases
- false pretense
Related words
Word family
See also
WordNet 2.1 (Princeton University). Wiktionary (CC BY-SA). CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. WordNet 2.1 Copyright Princeton University. All rights reserved. Wiktionary content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence.