(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.
Purport
Definition:
(n.) Design or tendency; meaning; import; tenor.
(n.) Disguise; covering.
(n.) To intend to show; to intend; to mean; to signify; to import; -- often with an object clause or infinitive.
Example Sentences:
(1) Three strains of C. burnetii were studied because of the purported propensity of each strain to cause acute or chronic disease and to be resistant or susceptible to antibiotics.
(2) If figurative language is defined as involving intentional violation of conceptual boundaries in order to highlight some correspondence, one must be sure that children credited with that competence have (1) the metacognitive and metalinguistic abilities to understand at least some of the implications of such language (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Nelson, 1974; Nelson & Nelson, 1978), (2) a conceptual organization that entails the purportedly violated conceptual boundaries (Lange, 1978), and (3) some notion of metaphoric tension as well as ground.
(3) We have studied the effect of a calcium ionophore, A23187, and the purported calmodulin inhibitors, calmidazolium and chlorpromazine, on direct intercellular communication between smooth muscle cells in the myometrium of delivering rats.
(4) It exploded when leading daily El Pais published copies of account ledgers purportedly showing irregular payments to top party members including Rajoy, its leader since 2004.
(5) Every story evolves with the speed of fact, not commentary or speculation.” In the case of MH17, Storyful published a blog outlining the key steps it took in verifying the information it gathered from social media, including searching through Twitter posts associated with the Donetsk People’s Republic – many of them since deleted – looking for historical references to surface-to-air missile systems, geolocating YouTube videos purporting to show the missile system in eastern Ukraine prior to the crash and verifying videos from the crash site.
(6) The sigma subunit regions purportedly involved in core enzyme binding and DNA promoter recognition were also highly conserved, despite the lack of a DNA promoter consensus sequence between E. coli and C. trachomatis promoters and the inability of E. coli holoenzyme to specifically transcribe chlamydial genes.
(7) The traffic was 10% higher than for the site's previous busiest day in the UK, which came on 9 May when the media reported on the creation of an account on the site which purported to name those who had taken out superinjunctions to prevent details being reported.
(8) Chaytor had claimed £12,925 between 2005 and 2006 for renting a flat in Regency Street, Westminster, producing a tenancy agreement purporting to show that he was paying £1,175 a month in rent to the landlord, Sarah Elizabeth Rastrick.
(9) Calls are also sensitive to a variety of purported anxiolytic and anxiogenic drugs, including the benzodiazepines, serotonin agonists, and ligands at the NMDA-glycine receptor complex.
(10) These findings are most consistent with a generalized abnormality in complex information processing and would not support theories purporting fundamental deficits in attention or information acquisition.
(11) But even more than the state’s failure to rescue the 21 hostages, who were believed to have been taken in separate incidents during December and January, Egyptians are criticising Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi for ordering airstrikes on purported Isis hideouts in Libya without a clear plan to evacuate Egyptians living in the country.
(12) The possibility that receptors may be so placed in other species warrants further work especially in those purported to lack any receptor.
(13) And it helps you spot phishing emails, because if an email appears in your shopping account purporting to come from your bank, for example, you'll immediately know it's a fake.
(14) They want to send a very clear message to China that they are serious about this.” Facebook Twitter Pinterest This image from the US navy purportedly shows Chinese dredging vessels in the waters around Mischief reef in the disputed Spratly archipelago in May 2015.
(15) Cell-mediated cytolytic (CMC) responses resulted from immunizations between rat strains purported to be identical at Ag-B, the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), but differing at other loci not linked to Ag-B.
(16) Because, you see, I have a hard time understanding why my wanting to stand up for democratic principles makes me unpatriotic, while the ones calling themselves patriots seem to think so little of the people and the principles that comprise the country they purport to love.
(17) At this time the information on these purported interactions is quite limited and there are far more questions than answers.
(18) A court in Egypt has sentenced eight men to three years in prison for appearing in a video that purported to show a gay wedding.
(19) Cognitive therapy is often used in treating attention-deficit-disordered (ADD) children because of its purported ability to address this population's attentional deficits and behavioral difficulties and to create durable therapeutic effects.
(20) This is a case report of a purported panencephalopathic type of Creutzfeldt-Jakob (C-J) disease in a 61-year-old Japanese farmer.