tendentious
Americanadjective
adjective
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of tendentious
Explanation
If you are writing a report on climate change and you ignore evidence that the earth is warming, the paper might be called tendentious. Tendentious means promoting a specific, and controversial, point of view. When something is tendentious, it shows a bias towards a particular point of view, especially one that people disagree about. It shares a root with the word tendency, which means "an inclination toward acting a certain way." If you have the tendency to talk in a tendentious manner about politics, people might tend to avoid you at parties.
Vocabulary lists containing tendentious
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Vocabulary Video Contest (2013) - List 1
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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.
It isn’t enough for him to regurgitate all this bad history that’s been totally debunked, or to present this tendentious theory of the Constitution as though it’s obviously correct.
From Slate ● Jul. 7, 2026
I am not persuaded by this criticism—the idea that Jaffa’s famous pugnacity arose from his Straussian ideas rather than his personality strikes me as tendentious.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 2, 2025
Like the origins of the Cold War, the legacy of the Versailles Treaty has been subject to so much revisionism, tendentious pleading and misinformation that closer examination is warranted.
From Salon ● Aug. 19, 2023
But while Martel’s novel has a deep and sometimes tendentious concern with religion and philosophy, Chakrabarti’s adaptation engages with these questions only glancingly.
From New York Times ● Mar. 30, 2023
For the first twenty years of his active life, roughly speaking, he was an artist pure and simple; during the subsequent twenty years, also roughly speaking, he has been didactic, controversial, and tendentious.
From Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 5 by Hamilton Wright Mabie
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.
