Word of the Day

: October 9, 2010

tendentious

adjective ten-DEN-shus

What It Means

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

tendentious in Context

The author’s tendentious history of the chemical company glosses over its role in one of the most catastrophic environmental accidents in history.

"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." -- From an article by Virginia Heffernan in The New York Times, August 29, 2010

Did You Know?

"Tendentious" is one of several words English speakers can choose when they want to suggest that someone has made up his or her 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. A derivative of the Medieval Latin word "tendentia," meaning "tendency," plus the English suffix "-ious," "tendentious" has been used in English as an adjective for biased attitudes since at least 1900.

Test Your Memory: Our featured word on September 18 was "scintillate." It means ...