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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

tenuous.

Thin in substance or consistency.

7 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

adj/ˈtɛ.njʊ.əs/Received-Pronunciation/ˈtɛn.ju.əs/General-American
  1. Thin in substance or consistency.

    The aether was thought to be of tenuous strands.
    Far from being amicable, the numbers seemed to turn their backs on each other, and I couldn't find a pair with even the most tenuous connection.
  2. Insubstantial.

    His argument was not convincing in the debate, considering how tenuous it was.
  3. Precarious, dependent upon unreliable things.

Where this word comes from

Irregularly formed from Latin tenuis (“thin, slight”) + -ous. Compare tenuious.

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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.