How to Use tendentious in a Sentence

tendentious

adjective
Definition of tendentiousnext
  • There’s a lot going on in that mouthful, some of it tendentious.
    — Curbed, 17 Feb. 2022
  • Even the names of the effects are more tendentious than descriptive.
    — Daniel Engber, Slate Magazine, 12 Sep. 2017
  • As Mark Joseph Stern writes at Slate, the reasoning was ridiculous and tendentious.
    — Ryan Cooper, The Week, 17 Jan. 2022
  • The New York Post ran a tendentious story about how the Nixons were living lavishly from a slush fund sustained by wealthy donors.
    — Barton Swaim, WSJ, 30 Oct. 2020
  • The work is built on a tendentious or partial account of events, not to mention outright falsehoods.
    — Rich Lowry, National Review, 24 Oct. 2019
  • The issue has since become tendentious, with the number of those who have been exempted by now amounting to tens of thousands.
    — Isabel Kershner, New York Times, 12 Sep. 2017
  • WikiLeaks was later accused of tendentious editing, but the clip would be shocking in any guise.
    — Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 9 Aug. 2021
  • But Newitz is not tendentious so much as concerned with conveying the granular texture of life as it is lived.
    — Paul Di Filippo, Washington Post, 27 Jan. 2023
  • The Species Concepts debate shows us this reality well, as even species can be tendentious.
    — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 16 May 2013
  • Ghoulish pundits with tendentious takes are a staple of the 24-hour social media and cable news circus.
    — Gerard Baker, WSJ, 30 Jan. 2023
  • But now assertions once viewed as tendentious have to be addressed and examined.
    — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 29 Dec. 2010
  • This is clearly a tendentious, after-the-fact argument.
    — Rich Lowry, National Review, 16 Nov. 2021
  • These days, every debate about free speech and social media in America feels tendentious and dumb.
    — Jay Caspian Kang, The New Yorker, 6 Dec. 2022
  • The magnitude of the coverage loss under both bills is too large to be explained away with any single tendentious argument.
    — Brian Beutler, New Republic, 28 June 2017
  • Polls can have their own politics, and media polls are often accused of being tendentious.
    — Joseph Epstein, WSJ, 26 Oct. 2021
  • The lawmakers behind the bill drew their ideas from a single tendentious book written by journalist Elias Castillo.
    — Salvatore J. Cordileone and José H. Gomez, WSJ, 12 Sep. 2021
  • For these reasons, efforts to explain the attack on Rushdie in the relatively trivial terms of the culture wars are at best tendentious, at worst a harmful distraction from the real threat.
    — Aaron R. Hanlon, The New Republic, 16 Aug. 2022
  • That historical account would be as self-serving and tendentious, in its own way, as our current glorious one.
    — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 15 May 2017
  • Such is the hazard of working a beat on which Fox News alternates among tendentious falsehoods, outright lunacy and hateful, racist content.
    — Washington Post, 19 July 2021
  • Suicides, accidents, and shooting in self-defense are not crimes, so the media’s lumping together of all forms of gun violence is tendentious.
    — Aron Ravin, National Review, 9 July 2021
  • The Rijksmuseum exhibition is structured around pairings of Spanish and Dutch pictures, only a few of which, in truth, feel other than glib and tendentious.
    — Washington Post, 8 Nov. 2019
  • Where those concerns intersect is in the tragic fact that, on this issue of such importance to public safety, the justices are very poor and tendentious historians.
    — Jack Rakove, WSJ, 2 Nov. 2023
  • Only in the 1990s did revisionist scholarship reveal this portrait to be tendentious almost to the point of fraudulence.
    — Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Review of Books, 5 Jan. 2021
  • But this tendentious satire of the beleaguered world of nonprofit theater has attracted the talents of serious theater artists.
    — Los Angeles Times, 25 June 2021
  • The drafters based this assertion partially on a tendentious and cherry-picked misreading of a study of Oregon Medicaid enrollees published in 2012.
    — Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 9 Mar. 2023
  • The move sparked a somewhat tendentious discussion in the Ars virtual office earlier today.
    — Jonathan M. Gitlin, Ars Technica, 18 Jan. 2023
  • These are not tendentious or subjective ways to describe Trump’s predicament, but rather inescapable consequences of things Trump has done to expose himself to legal jeopardy and deny his loyalists clean lines of defense against the bad news.
    — Brian Beutler, New Republic, 16 June 2017
  • Földényi, a scholar and critic who teaches the theory of art, in Budapest, is an intense, tendentious, often maddening presence.
    — James Wood, The New Yorker, 25 May 2020
  • Clever compositions enliven the shots of cameras and control rooms, where screens within screens transmit tendentious opinions to the American people.
    — Troy Patterson, The New Yorker, 30 June 2019
  • Nor would one expect any such value judgment from the CBO, which sedulously adheres to its duty of analysis, devoid of tendentious commentary.
    — Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 27 Sep. 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'tendentious.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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