"pretensive" meaning in English

See pretensive in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Adjective

Forms: more pretensive [comparative], most pretensive [superlative]
Etymology: From the participle stem of Latin praetendere + -ive. Etymology templates: {{uder|en|la|praetendere}} Latin praetendere, {{suffix|en||ive}} + -ive Head templates: {{en-adj}} pretensive (comparative more pretensive, superlative most pretensive)
  1. (now rare) Pretended; feigned. Tags: archaic
    Sense id: en-pretensive-en-adj-SvT7AvtQ
  2. (chiefly US) Pretentious. Tags: US
    Sense id: en-pretensive-en-adj-~vP9sz-x Categories (other): American English, English entries with incorrect language header, English terms suffixed with -ive, English undefined derivations, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 28 72 Disambiguation of English terms suffixed with -ive: 19 81 Disambiguation of English undefined derivations: 18 82 Disambiguation of Pages with 1 entry: 17 83 Disambiguation of Pages with entries: 7 93
The following are not (yet) sense-disambiguated
Derived forms: pretensively, pretensiveness
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  "etymology_templates": [
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  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "adj",
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      "attestations": [
        {
          "date": "from 17th c.",
          "references": []
        }
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        "Pretended; feigned."
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          "pretended"
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      "raw_glosses": [
        "(now rare) Pretended; feigned."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "archaic"
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        {
          "date": "from 19th c.",
          "references": []
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          "parents": [],
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        },
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          "_dis": "18 82",
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          "_dis": "17 83",
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          "ref": "1967, Charles Bukowski, letter, in On Writing, Canongate 2016, p. 95",
          "text": "I used half a lifetime reading the critics, and while I found the content pretensive I found the style somehow pleasurable […]."
        }
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        "Pretentious."
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        "(chiefly US) Pretentious."
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      "form": "more pretensive",
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    },
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          "date": "from 17th c.",
          "references": []
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        "Pretended; feigned."
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        "(now rare) Pretended; feigned."
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        "(chiefly US) Pretentious."
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      ]
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  "word": "pretensive"
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-02-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-01-01 using wiktextract (f492ef9 and 9905b1f). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.