tendentious

adjective

ten·​den·​tious ten-ˈden(t)-shəs 

disapproving

: marked by a tendency in favor of a particular point of view : biased

Radio and television in South Africa are effectively state-owned. … News reporting is selective and tendentious, customarily presenting only the government's view of events, and attacking or ignoring its opponents.

—William Finnegan

YouTube-style montages and mash-ups have been an excellent tool for seeing and showing how rhetoric takes shape. Of course, these videos can themselves be polemical, and people use them to advance all kinds of tendentious theories.

—Virginia Heffernan

tendentiously adverb

tendentiousness noun

Did you know?

Tendentious is one of several words English speakers can choose when they want to suggest that someone has made up their mind in advance. You may be partial to predisposed or prone to favor partisan, but whatever your leanings, we’re inclined to think you’ll benefit from adding tendentious to your repertoire. Tendentious is a relatively recent arrival to English, considering its Latin roots. In the latter half of the 19th century, English users took the Latinate stem tendenti- (from tendentia, meaning “tendency”) and combined it with the familiar adjective suffix -ious to form a word describing someone with a tendency to favor a particular point of view, motivated by an intent to promote a particular cause.

Examples of tendentious in a Sentence

He made some extremely tendentious remarks.

Recent Examples on the Web

At their worst, the postwar social problem films were tendentious, preachy, and puffed up with their own virtuous motives. —Thomas Doherty, The Hollywood Reporter, 9 Aug. 2024

Critical race theory is a prime example of this blight, as are the equally tendentious teachings of intersectionality. —Washington Examiner - Political News and Conservative Analysis About Congress, the President, and the Federal Government, 9 Jan. 2024

The memorial also mentions several Jewish victims of Arab robberies and 13 Jews who were killed in British bombing raids on Palestine during World War I. Palestinian historiography and commemorative culture rely on a similarly tendentious use of history. —Tom Segev, Foreign Affairs, 23 Apr. 2024

Critics, again mostly Republicans, weighed in again with tendentious lectures on social media about the moral imperative of meeting one’s obligation to pay back a loan. —Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 16 Apr. 2024

Word History

Etymology

tendenti- (taken as Latinate stem of tendency) + -ous, probably after German tendenziös

First Known Use

1874, in the meaning defined above

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