tendentious
Americanadjective
adjective
Other Word Forms
- tendentiously adverb
- tendentiousness noun
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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30 GRE Words Beginning with "T" "U" "V" and "W"
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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.
Ms. Kuin’s discussion of Diogenes’ attitude toward death is similarly tendentious.
From The Wall Street Journal • Dec. 17, 2025
The words and phrases that the plaintiffs replaced with their own tendentious language are in italics.
From Los Angeles Times • Mar. 8, 2024
You can even find that phrasing distasteful or counterproductive, but trying to hang the word genocide on it, and to punish anyone who uses it, is tendentious.
From Slate • Dec. 13, 2023
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
According to them, even the data which had been pretty generally regarded as objective, rest chiefly upon tendentious fiction.
From Mohammedanism Lectures on Its Origin, Its Religious and Political Growth, and Its Present State by Hurgronje, C. Snouck
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.
