(disapproving) trying to appear important, intelligent, etc. in order to impress other people; trying to be sth that you are not, in order to impress:
That's a pretentious name for a dog! * It was just an ordinary house-nothing pretentious. * He's so pretentious!
compareUNPRETENTIOUS
pretentiously adverb
pretentiousness noun [U]:
There was no hint of pretentiousness in her manner.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
Where does this definition of pretentious come from?
This entry for pretentious is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is pretentious a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, pretentious is tagged as adjective.
Does pretentious appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — pretentious appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
