tendentious
adjective
William FinneganVirginia Heffernan
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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
Los Angeles Times, 8 July 2025
This is obviously tendentious—nor does Stewart mean it entirely seriously—but, then, Lincoln, like Jesus, is easily made to conform to whatever ideological need the historian brings to him.
—Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, 21 Apr. 2025
But his work, even at its most tendentious, speaks uncannily to our current political mood of gnawing anxiety, fleeting optimism, and partial resignation over the future of the human project.
—Nikil Saval, New Yorker, 7 Apr. 2025
Critics of the Trump administration’s long-overdue attempt to degrade the Houthis’ capacity to disrupt international shipping (a terrorist initiative that is occasionally quite deferential to the West’s enemies in Beijing and Moscow) have made a variety of tendentious claims.
—The Editors, National Review, 18 Mar. 2025
See All Example Sentences for tendentious
Cite this Entry
“Tendentious.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tendentious. Accessed 25 Jul. 2025.
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