pretentious

adjective as in snobbish, conceited

Strongest matches

arty, exaggerated, grandiose, hollow, overblown, pompous, showy, stilted, turgid

Strong match

Weak matches

affected, assuming, aureate, big, bombastic, chichi, conspicuous, euphuistic, extravagant, feigned, flamboyant, flashy, flaunting, flowery, gaudy, grandiloquent, high-flown, high-sounding, highfalutin, imposing, inflated, jazzy, la-di-da, lofty, magniloquent, mincing, ornate, overambitious, puffed up, put on, rhetorical, specious, splashy, swank, too-too, tumid, utopian, vainglorious

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Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

I just came back—I sound so pretentious.

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“It is pretentious,” she protested to her diary on Sept. 6, 1922.

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A pretentious young critic for the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma who never takes off his dark glasses, even at the movies, and rarely stops smoking, he is aching to make a feature of his own.

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The writing is muddled at times by a certain narrative slippage wherein one cannot tell whether the biting observations about clueless classmates and pretentious doctors come from Alice or Mr. deBoer.

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Ms. King seeds her love story with engaging dialogue and literary references that are never pretentious or gratuitous.

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pretentious

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