How to Use pretext in a Sentence

pretext

noun

• She went back to her friend's house on the pretext that she had forgotten her purse.
• Ukraine and the West say this is a baseless pretext for war.
  — Fox News, 1 May 2022
• The rule quickly caused pretext stops by the LAPD to plummet.
  — Noah Goldberg, Los Angeles Times, 20 Dec. 2023
• The play isn’t the thing but simply the pretext for disaster.
  — Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times, 14 Aug. 2023
• Holiday’s drug use is a pretext for both the F.B.I. and Daniels.
  — Wesley Morris, New York Times, 12 Oct. 2022
• On the other hand, the pandemic was little more than a pretext in the first place.
  — Samuel Goldman, The Week, 6 Apr. 2022
• In essence, Pence was being asked to endorse a stack of forgeries and then use them as pretext for a coup.
  — Amy Davidson Sorkin, The New Yorker, 13 Aug. 2023
• Ukraine and its allies call that a false pretext for a war of aggression.
  — Reuters, NBC News, 31 May 2022
• Prosecutors said the teenagers were lured to the same park under the pretext of a gang meeting.
  — Salvador Rizzo, Washington Post, 2 July 2022
• To be clear: Everyone in the world of academia understands this to be a pretext, and a shabby one at that.
  — The Editors, National Review, 8 Mar. 2023
• Such claims could be used as a pretext for escalating the war.
  — John Bacon, USA TODAY, 2 Nov. 2022
• Western leaders dismissed the claims as a false pretext for the attack.
  — chicagotribune.com, 24 Mar. 2022
• His gut tells him that all this talk about the cost of living is simply a pretext for owners to make more money.
  — New York Times, 20 Aug. 2022
• Russia still bans protests on the pretext that mass gatherings are a health hazard.
  — Ann M. Simmons, WSJ, 11 Nov. 2023
• Cyrus believes this was all a pretext for ending the arrangement.
  — Charles Bethea, The New Yorker, 13 Feb. 2024
• The pretext might be different, but the objective would be the same: subduing Ukraine.
  — Samuel Charap, Foreign Affairs, 13 July 2023
• This continued for over a year, after which the scammer asked for $5,000 on the pretext of paying a credit-card bill.
  — Bart Ziegler, WSJ, 8 Sep. 2022
• Leach, without any pretext, told Salisbury to buy a plane ticket to Lubbock and come to a practice.
  — Kevin Reynolds, The Salt Lake Tribune, 16 Dec. 2022
• Finding fault is a pretext. Re: Annoying: What about dads?
  — Carolyn Hax, Washington Post, 16 Jan. 2024
• If Putin was looking for a pretext to cut off countries that have supported Ukraine, this could serve that function.
  — CBS News, 27 Apr. 2022
• In the case of Sandy Hook, Jones aired programming for years that the slaughter of first graders was a hoax contrived as a pretext for gun control and the children and parents were actors.
  — Hartford Courant, 20 Sep. 2022
• The shareholders argue Musk used the bots issue as a pretext for backing out of the deal or renegotiating the sale price.
  — Jacob Carpenter, Fortune, 27 May 2022
• Her killing raised concerns that Russia would use the bombing as a pretext for escalating its six-month war in Ukraine.
  — Harold Maass, The Week, 23 Aug. 2022
• On a superficial level, the book was his pretext for not working and earning money; the woman had to raise the children and earn the money.
  — Michael Lapointe, The New Yorker, 26 Apr. 2022
• The official noted that that any transit to the US of Tsai should not be used by China as a pretext for an aggressive response.
  — Tara Subramaniam, CNN, 21 Mar. 2023
• The phony narrative that Liz Cheney is pushing has been the radical left's pretext for their all-out war on free speech.
  — Aaron Navarro, CBS News, 16 Aug. 2022
• The laws of war were invoked following 9/11 for sound reasons, not as a pretext for avoiding the civilian justice system.
  — Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 12 Mar. 2022
• Apollo was a villain in the first Rocky film, a more nuanced antagonist in the second, a best friend and guru in the third, and a pretext for revenge and the expiation of guilt in the fourth.
  — Vulture, 4 Feb. 2024
• On leave with her squadron in Wyoming — the pretext for some whispers of swaying cowboy hoedown music — Jess falls in love with a rancher, Eric, and gets pregnant.
  — Zachary Woolfe, New York Times, 29 Oct. 2023
• Also in the weeks before the October 7, tractors were brought to the border area under the pretext of agricultural work and to prepare for the border protests.
  — Assaf Orion, Foreign Affairs, 3 Nov. 2023

Last Updated: 3 May 2024