pretentious.
Motivated by an inappropriate, excessive, or unjustified desire to impress others.
Meaning & usage
Motivated by an inappropriate, excessive, or unjustified desire to impress others.
Her dress was obviously more pretentious than comfortable.
Marked by an unwarranted claim to importance or distinction.
Their song titles are pretentious in the context of their basic lyrics.
Marked by pretense (not necessarily false pretense); intent upon success; ambitious.
Where this word comes from
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.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.