(a.) Doubtful or not settled in opinion; being in doubt; wavering or fluctuating; undetermined.
(a.) Occasioning doubt; not clear, or obvious; equivocal; questionable; doubtful; as, a dubious answer.
(a.) Of uncertain event or issue; as, in dubious battle.
Example Sentences:
(1) It’s impossible to automate fully the process of separating truth from falsehood, and it’s dubious to cede such control to for-profit media giants.
(2) The draw was enough to take England to the finals in Japan, where Beckham exorcised the demons of four years earlier by scoring the only goal (a dubiously awarded penalty) in the defeat of Argentina.
(3) But Blair's address - "history will forgive us" - was a dubious exercise in group therapy: the cheers smacked of pathetic gratitude, as he piously pardoned the legislators, as well as himself, for the catastrophe of Iraq.
(4) I drive past buildings that I know, or assume, to house bedsits, their stucco peeling like eczema, their window frames rattling like old bones, and I cannot help myself from picturing the scene within: a dubious pot on an equally dubious single ring, the female in charge of it half-heartedly stirring its contents at the same time as she files her nails, reads an old Vogue, or chats to some distant parent on the telephone.
(5) A dubious pattern is emerging of donations through front companies.
(6) The relationship of this metabolic aberration to the production of headache still remains dubious for various reasons.
(7) During his stints in the Bush and Obama administration Comey has continually taken authoritarian and factually dubious public stances both at odds with responsible public policy and sometimes the law.
(8) Today the overestimation of human understanding is reflected in a dogmatic adherence to specific professional or idealogically biased doctrines and in the dubious ideal of a purely empirical science with its limited applicability to mankind.
(9) It seems clear that even as we buy cheap clothes with dubious provenance, from an ethical standpoint, people want to do better.
(10) Their mechanism is dubious: swelling of mitochondria and intracellular lipidosis, which could signify cellular hypoxia, are rarely present.
(11) Imprecise definitions of these complications of necrotizing pancreatitis make inter-institutional comparisons of previously identified data dubious.
(12) Critics say this is part of a broader, dubious attempt to appease the Kremlin and boost bilateral trade.
(13) In his attempt to justify the unjustifiable, Mr Grieve has clutched at a fragile constitutional doctrine and adopted a deeply dubious legal course.
(14) Exporting what appear to be educational success stories is a dubious enterprise, because it is so easy to misread how another country's system works and to discount its cultural background.
(15) Observed retrospectively, in some cases death was the result of dubious indication.
(16) The Guardian’s own readers’ anthology of dubious deals – crusty rolls 40p, two for £1!
(17) Sensitivity (dubious + positive, after exclusion of inadequates) was 0.83 and dependent on histologic type (infiltrating = 0.87, intraductal = 0.68).
(18) The vice-president even made repeated trips to CIA headquarters in Langley to bully analysts into producing more hawkish reports, while Rumsfeld’s Pentagon sucked up highly dubious “evidence” from Iraqi exiles and ideological freelancers.
(19) This becomes very dubious when they are more numerous.
(20) The change in surface tension did not correlate with a change in lung retractive forces or with lung lipid content and was, therefore, of dubious biological significance.
Tenuous
Definition:
(a.) Thin; slender; small; minute.
(a.) Rare; subtile; not dense; -- said of fluids.
(a.) Lacking substance, as a tenuous argument.
Example Sentences:
(1) Diagnosis based on the character of the stridor alone is tenuous, and consideration of presentation other than the stridor is discussed in the management of these infants.
(2) Indian women are aware of our tenuous grip on our rights.
(3) Rising losses among the nearly 350,000-strong Afghan army and police, and a desertion rate of about 50,000 a year, also support Karzai's contention that control of large parts of the country remains tenuous.
(4) The results suggest that chronic sunlight exposure may be associated with an impediment to normal maturation of human dermal collagen resulting in tenuous amount of HHL.
(5) What the film does, though, is use these incidents to build an idiosyncratic but insightful picture of Lawrence, played indelibly by Peter O'Toole in his debut role: a complicated, egomaniacal and physically masochistic man, at once god-like and all too flawed, with a tenuous grip both on reality and on sanity.
(6) Because of disruption of the fasciocutaneous circulation, the perfusion of randomly based flaps is frequently tenuous.
(7) New employment data today suggested that hurricane Sandy is hurting already tenuous US job growth.
(8) Although extrapolation from animal studies may be tenuous, the present findings may explain the link between nutrition and the occurrence of alcoholic pancreatitis.
(9) If any of them is neglected or isolated from the rest, the whole will be impoverished-the student will suffocate in disconnected, empirical facts; fanciful theories will be spun from tenuous evidence; well established theory will be neglected by the practitioner; the best-intentioned schemes will have disastrous long-term consequences.
(10) However, circumstantial evidence is beginning to provide a tenuous link between smoking and the protease-antiprotease imbalance hypothesis.
(11) Though one possible mechanism for this reversal may include the inhibition of NAD-kinase by cAMP, there is evidence to suggest that such a direct cause-effect relationship is at present tenuous.
(12) We feel that tenuous attachments of the vitreous body to the fovea could exert traction on the vitreo-retinal interface or shrinkage of a fibrocellular membrane on the inner foveal surface could lead to the observations made by us.
(13) As has been long predicted by military critics of a bombing campaign, Mayville said Isis was already changing its tactics in response to the air strikes, particularly around Mt Sinjar, where on Saturday US warplanes attacked Isis positions surrounding the mountain where tens of thousands of Iraqi Yazidis have taken a tenuous refuge.
(14) In the years since the housing market bottomed out, Tremont and other pockets of Cleveland have witnessed a tenuous revitalisation thanks to newcomers seeking city lifestyles and new investment in 21st-century industry.
(15) Although the bright green light helped counteract sleepiness, any causal link with changes in melatonin output seem tenuous.
(16) America's arch enemy, Muammar Gaddafi, had thousands of troops camped in the remote desert of northern Chad, a forward front in his pan-African expansionist plan, but a thousand miles from Tripoli on tenuous supply lines and thus highly vulnerable.
(17) Data indicate that non-rehospitalization is associated with a stance of "positive withdrawal" (Corin 1990); it is characterized by a position at a distance from social roles and social relationships, combined with various strategies for keeping more tenuous links with the social environment.
(18) However, their entry into force was delayed for a "few days" according to a statement from Brussels, to leave time to assess the implementation of a tenuous ceasefire agreement in Ukraine negotiated last Friday.
(19) Although these results suggest a tenuous relationship between scrapie pathology and the integrity of neurotransmitter systems, it is possible that compensatory neurochemical changes in uncompromised neuronal populations may have masked potentially specific neurotransmitter effects.
(20) Mair’s links with far-right groups in the US and South Africa are well documented, but his associations with similar organisations closer to home appear more tenuous.