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adjective

pretentious

making claim to or creating an appearance of (often undeserved) importance or distinction

In a sentence

Six example sentences with pretentious, each labelled with its topic.

  • Twelve words of description for a single radish struck the reviewer as pretentious, especially at that price.

    Cooking

  • The wall text was pretentious enough to need translating, three paragraphs of theory attached to a plain white square.

    Art

  • The columns are pretentious on a two-story office block, borrowing a temple's grandeur for a building full of insurance clerks.

    Architecture

  • Critics called the novel pretentious for opening with forty pages of untranslated Latin and a chart of the author's dreams.

    Literature

  • The band's third album struck fans as pretentious, a double record about the meaning of time with no song under nine minutes.

    Music

  • Calling the receptionist a Director of First Impressions struck new hires as pretentious, and everyone kept saying receptionist.

    Business

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Found in these word lists

Found in 5 published word listsRecognized

Each source is a published word list that contains pretentious. No exam board publishes an official GRE, GMAT or SAT list; GMAT words come from GRE lists and the Academic Word List.

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