as in pretense
a display of emotion or behavior that is insincere or intended to deceive
it was clear to her friends that her reaction to the news was pure playacting
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Recent Examples of playacting
Emily Zarevich, JSTOR Daily, 11 Sep. 2025
Verb
Hence the infamous playacting subplot in her 1814 novel Mansfield Park, a novel written when Austen was at her professional peak.
—Emily Zarevich, JSTOR Daily, 11 Sep. 2025
Recent Examples of Synonyms for playacting
Noun
-
By showing both timelines, director Cato Kusters resists using Julian’s illness as a plot device, encouraging us to watch these women without the pretense of melodrama.—
Jourdain Searles,
HollywoodReporter,
9 Sep. 2025
-
But not everyone accepts that pretense.—
Miranda Jeyaretnam,
Time,
1 Sep. 2025
Noun
-
The eligibility dates for the 2024 Emmy Awards apply to shows that aired between June 1, 2024, and May 31, 2025.—
Saman Shafiq,
USA Today,
14 Sep. 2025
-
My weekend streaming guide is live, so be sure to check that out for some new show and movie ideas.—
Erik Kain,
Forbes.com,
14 Sep. 2025
Verb
-
One particularly notable viral video featured the son of a provincial government minister posing in front of a tree made from boxes of luxury labels including Louis Vuitton, Cartier and Gucci.—
Nir Kshetri,
The Conversation,
14 Sep. 2025
-
Social media posts from his family show years of him shooting and posing with various weapons at gun ranges and shows alongside his siblings.—
Richard Hall,
Time,
13 Sep. 2025
Noun
-
When Simone decides to grasp Kiki’s life for herself by starting an affair with Peter, though, Michaela’s beatific facade slips.—
Roxana Hadadi,
Vulture,
10 Sep. 2025
-
Today, its Portland stone façade and arched windows still speak to that Victorian grandeur, but inside the story has shifted.—
Lauren Mowery,
Forbes.com,
10 Sep. 2025
Verb
-
These issues are very real and generally speaking there are very few, if any, magic combinations of settings to cure these problems for many players, and pretending like that’s true is either disingenuous or misinformed.—
Paul Tassi,
Forbes.com,
15 Sep. 2025
-
Scrolling on one’s phone can be a deadening experience, but here’s someone feeling, or at least pretending to feel, a genuine feeling—even if the abundance of these videos surely numbs us further.—
Spencer Kornhaber,
The Atlantic,
15 Sep. 2025
Noun
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The attack was widely condemned in the Middle East and beyond as an act that could escalate tensions in a region already on edge.—
Jarrett Renshaw,
USA Today,
13 Sep. 2025
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KPop Demon Hunters transforms loving your favorite artist from a hobby into an act of creation itself.—
Yvonne Kim,
The Atlantic,
12 Sep. 2025
Verb
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With more than 100,000 copies sold from her four EP releases between 2022 and 2024, Chaeyeon took on acting this summer as one of the lead roles in the web series Fresh Romance.—
Jeff Benjamin,
Forbes.com,
13 Sep. 2025
-
The resulting unrolled network consists of multiple stages, each acting like a mini-network that mimics one iteration of optimization.—
Bojan Stojkovski,
Interesting Engineering,
13 Sep. 2025
Noun
-
All this reintroduces the problem of arbitrary outcomes, in a different guise.—
Joshua Rothman,
New Yorker,
9 Sep. 2025
-
Unfortunately a recent deep fake has come in the guise of a friend.—
Brittany Allen,
Literary Hub,
9 Sep. 2025
Cite this Entry
“Playacting.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/playacting. Accessed 18 Sep. 2025.
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