tendentious
adjective
William FinneganVirginia Heffernan
Did you know?
Tendentious is one of several words English speakers can choose when they want to suggest that someone has made up their mind in advance. You may be partial to predisposed or prone to favor partisan, but whatever your leanings, we’re inclined to think you’ll benefit from adding tendentious to your repertoire. Tendentious is a relatively recent arrival to English, considering its Latin roots. In the latter half of the 19th century, English users took the Latinate stem tendenti- (from tendentia, meaning “tendency”) and combined it with the familiar adjective suffix -ious to form a word describing someone with a tendency to favor a particular point of view, motivated by an intent to promote a particular cause.
Examples of tendentious in a Sentence
The Editors, National Review, 5 Apr. 2024
The words and phrases that the plaintiffs replaced with their own tendentious language are in italics.
—Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 8 Mar. 2024
Ackman began his crusade with complaints about Gay’s response to purported antisemitism on the Harvard campus and her flatfooted response to a tendentious question from right-wing Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) at a congressional hearing.
—Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 16 Jan. 2024
The opinion was tendentious and riddled with factual errors, citing material from the Twitter Files and the weaponization subcommittee.
—Jonathan Blitzer, The New Yorker, 21 Oct. 2023
Where those concerns intersect is in the tragic fact that, on this issue of such importance to public safety, the justices are very poor and tendentious historians.
—Jack Rakove, WSJ, 2 Nov. 2023
The simple plot of Strange Way of Life is a love story, set in the Old West — not the phony Middle America that was the basis of Brokeback Mountain’s tendentious political correctness.
—Armond White, National Review, 27 Oct. 2023
More recent tendentious campaign features by Dinesh D’Souza and Steve Bannon are essentially Pavlovian infomercials.
—J. Hoberman, The New Republic, 22 June 2023
Add to this the persistent notion that Schoenberg single-handedly destroyed the future of music, as well as the basic difficulty of so much as remembering a melody from any of his works—let alone learning one of them—and the concern begins to seem more than a tendentious hook.
—Christopher Carroll, Harper's Magazine, 9 June 2023
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'tendentious.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Dictionary Entries Near tendentious
Cite this Entry
“Tendentious.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tendentious. Accessed 25 Apr. 2024.
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