arrière-pensée
Americannoun
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:
And yet Titian expresses this by no means exalted conception with a grand candour, an absence of arrière-pensée such as almost purges it of offence.
From The Later Works of Titian by Phillips, Claude
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 Sergeant, Adeline
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 Fuller, Henry Blake
But the needy poet may have had some arrière-pensée.
From Post-Augustan Poetry From Seneca to Juvenal by Butler, Harold Edgeworth
He possessed a virtue rare among artists, that of gratitude without arrière-pensée.
From Human, All-Too-Human, Part II by Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
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 J?kai, M?r
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.
