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

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

The editors struck from the same passage a tendentious connection between Kennedy and the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare's CEO. —David Folkenflik, NPR, 3 Feb. 2025

Word History

Etymology

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

First Known Use

1874, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for tendentious

• conscientious
• unpretentious
• contentious
• pretentious
• sententious

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