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
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
As a matter of fact, there was an arrière-pensée underlying his words.
From 'Tween Snow and Fire A Tale of the Last Kafir War by Bertram Mitford
But the needy poet may have had some arrière-pensée.
From Post-Augustan Poetry From Seneca to Juvenal by Harold Edgeworth Butler
Tintoretto communicated his own savage grandeur, his own unrest, to those whom he depicted; Paolo Veronese charmed without arrière-pensée by the intensity of vitality which with perfect simplicity he preserved in his sitters.
From The Later Works of Titian by Claude Phillips
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.
