arrière-pensée
Americannoun
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arrière-pensées
plural
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of arrière-pensée
C19: literally: behind thought
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
He was perfectly frank and manly: he spoke without arrière-pensée, he meant what he said, and was ready to believe that other people meant it too.
From A True Friend A Novel by Adeline Sergeant
He said this, as he said so many other things, with a frank and bold directness that made any suspicion of an arrière-pensée almost an impossibility.
From With the Procession by Henry Blake Fuller
The Girondists alone had an arrière-pensée in their apparent favour towards him.
From History of the Girondists, Volume I Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution by H. T. Ryde
And I watched him tip the waiter without the least arrière-pensée on either side.
From Mr. Justice Raffles by E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
But the needy poet may have had some arrière-pensée.
From Post-Augustan Poetry From Seneca to Juvenal by Harold Edgeworth Butler
The envoys noticed that their words had ingeniously been twisted, but as they also had their own arrière-pensées in regard to the Turks, they only looked at each other with a smile and withdrew.
From The Slaves of the Padishah by M?r J?kai
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
