(v. t.) To lay a claim to; to allege a title to; to claim.
(v. t.) To hold before, or put forward, as a cloak or disguise for something else; to exhibit as a veil for something hidden.
(v. t.) To hold out, or represent, falsely; to put forward, or offer, as true or real (something untrue or unreal); to show hypocritically, or for the purpose of deceiving; to simulate; to feign; as, to pretend friendship.
(v. t.) To intend; to design; to plot; to attempt.
(v. t.) To hold before one; to extend.
(v. i.) To put in, or make, a claim, truly or falsely; to allege a title; to lay claim to, or strive after, something; -- usually with to.
(v. i.) To hold out the appearance of being, possessing, or performing; to profess; to make believe; to feign; to sham; as, to pretend to be asleep.
Example Sentences:
(1) His anti-politics act may just be a shtick – pretending he's still on Have I Got News for You, satirising politics even though he's right at the centre of it – but it liberates him from the usual constraints.
(2) "Obviously [writers in translation] have a disadvantage and there's no sense pretending they don't, of being read in translation," said Gekoski.
(3) Tony Abbott pretended to support the renewable energy industry before the election but is now “launching a full-frontal attack” according to Labor’s environment spokesman Mark Butler.
(4) The Telegraph's secret taping of Cable and fellow Liberal Democrat ministers while pretending to be concerned constituents has raised eyebrows in some media quarters, but the newspaper has claimed a "clear public interest" defence for its actions.
(5) It is hard to tell who has really suffered, and who is only pretending.
(6) Respecting the frequency of invalidity this cancer pretends the second place among these diseases.
(7) When this parliament votes for another referendum as it inevitably will, thanks to the perpetual crutch that the Greens provide, let’s not pretend it reflects the will of the Scottish people, because it doesn’t.
(8) Non-doms could no longer pretend to live in Monaco while living in the UK for four working days a week.
(9) But equally, you’re ignoring how these people feel if you try and pretend they don’t feel their area is changing.
(10) Additionally, the Schmidt-Furlow investigators looked at instances where female interrogators had fondled prisoners, or pretended to splash menstrual blood upon them.
(11) Stewart Lee with a mask made of meat, pretending to be Canadian?
(12) Yes, there are other reasons why a boy might take a clock out of its casing & pretend he’d made it.
(13) It would be idle to pretend that Cameron doesn't have talents as a leader.
(14) Their leaders are charging round the country pretending they are going to get an overall majority, but in their heart of hearts they know it is not true, you can see it in their eyes.” The deputy prime minister, whose party has been in coalition with the Conservatives since 2010, said the next question for the public was “that since neither David Cameron or Ed Miliband are going to walk into Downing Street on their own, who is it the voters want at their side”.
(15) By pretending to ignore the scientific evidence, AquaBounty is doing readers a disservice.
(16) Pro-Europeans don't do themselves any favours by trying to pretend that it didn't happen.
(17) Indeed watching the prime minister singling out unemployed youngsters for uniquely punitive measures while pretending it is for their own good, cheered on by a gang of braying chums, it looks less like the behaviour of a national statesman and more like the petty vindictiveness of a schoolyard bully.
(18) And he must not pretend to be ignorant of the consequences of continuing to burn coal or take refuge in a "carbon cap" or some "target" for future emission reductions.
(19) During the collection of a one-hour spontaneous language sample from each child the experimenter pretended 20 times not to understand and asked, "What?"
(20) He would go around the communities and pretend to have a conversation with people but really his eyes were on the children playing," she says.
Pretension
Definition:
(n.) The act of pretending, or laying claim; the act of asserting right or title.
(n.) A claim made, whether true or false; a right alleged or assumed; a holding out the appearance of possessing a certain character; as, pretensions to scholarship.
Example Sentences:
(1) Should Britain start behaving like the small island state it is rather than maintaining the pretensions of being a significant world player?
(2) The most important determinants of the behavior which connect the organism with its informational environment are pretensions to space, time, metabolism and changing of form.
(3) He is wary of pretension, alive to all shades of irony.
(4) The peculiar skill of HTB has been to preserve the confidence of the public-school officer class that it had a duty to lead, but to drop the surrounding pretensions, the idea being that what remains is professionalism and commitment.
(5) Preliminary results suggest that the effect produced by the distraction of ring pairs on interfragmentary micromotion is as significant as pretensioning of the wires.
(6) Using a strain gauged pretension device, a procedure for determining the natural state tension and extension fields in the skin has been developed.
(7) He was a poet of modest pretensions and, although his translation of Julius Caesar was not brilliant, he did, after all, dare to translate Shakespeare.
(8) The track, shamelessly mocking the pretensions of people who falsely associate themselves with the fashions and styles of the sprauncy Gangnam district of Seoul – a kind of South Korean Beverly Hills – has been called a "force for world peace" by the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon .
(9) Only one party with pretensions to government made the wrong choice; the Conservative Party of Britain.
(10) Leslie (1987b) proposed a new, metarepresentational model for the cognition of pretense.
(11) They were victims of a swatting attack, a malicious form of hoax where special weapons and tactics (Swat) teams are called to a victim’s home under false pretenses, with potentially deadly results.
(12) In fact, wet deposition has long been hailed as a possible solution by higher powers, with their lofty pretensions to control the elements.
(13) "I love the grunge, the lack of pretension and the simpler way of life," says the Manchester-born DJ and record producer, better known as A Guy Called Gerald, who helped to shape the acid house scene in the 1980s.
(14) Two explanations for this breakdown in the belief-desire reasoning subserving pretense are considered.
(15) To the extent they acknowledged any of this at all, their responses ranged from indulging patently absurd pretenses (this was just a polite request from the White House: what's wrong with that?)
(16) One need not be a supporter of China’s provocative and aggressive actions in the South China Sea to notice that the incident did not involve a Chinese nuclear-capable bomber in the Caribbean, or off the coast of California, where China has no pretensions of establishing a “Chinese lake”.
(17) This, too, is perpetual disaster capitalism, creating havoc and inflicting disaster upon individual souls for corporate greed without even needing the pretense of a crisis for an excuse.
(18) What I don’t like is the pretense and the assumption that someway or another Hackney needs to be grateful for all these up-and-coming industries.
(19) Clegg will insist that the Lib Dems have already replaced Labour as the country's leading "progressive" party and scoff at Tory pretensions to the same label.
(20) In the individual case with a provable causality of trauma on the acceleration of tumor progress a pretension for insurance es legal.