How to Use tendentious in a Sentence

tendentious

adjective
  • He made some extremely tendentious remarks.
  • There’s a lot going on in that mouthful, some of it tendentious.
    — Curbed, 17 Feb. 2022
  • But the film ends on a tendentious and discordant note that detracts from the whole.
    — The Editors, National Review, 5 Apr. 2024
  • Even the names of the effects are more tendentious than descriptive.
    — Daniel Engber, Slate Magazine, 12 Sep. 2017
  • 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 words and phrases that the plaintiffs replaced with their own tendentious language are in italics.
    — Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 8 Mar. 2024
  • But now assertions once viewed as tendentious have to be addressed and examined.
    — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 29 Dec. 2010
  • Polls can have their own politics, and media polls are often accused of being tendentious.
    — Joseph Epstein, WSJ, 26 Oct. 2021
  • But to most Americans, such tendentious bloviating falls on deaf ears.
    — Josh Hammer, MSNBC Newsweek, 22 Oct. 2025
  • But to most Americans, such tendentious bloviating falls on deaf ears.
    — Josh Hammer, MSNBC Newsweek, 17 Oct. 2025
  • WikiLeaks was later accused of tendentious editing, but the clip would be shocking in any guise.
    — Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 9 Aug. 2021
  • At their worst, the postwar social problem films were tendentious, preachy, and puffed up with their own virtuous motives.
    — Thomas Doherty, The Hollywood Reporter, 9 Aug. 2024
  • 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
  • The New York Times has heard about it (and probably published a tendentious op-ed about it.
    — Gustavo Turner, HollywoodReporter, 26 Mar. 2026
  • 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
  • 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 Species Concepts debate shows us this reality well, as even species can be tendentious.
    — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 16 May 2013
  • 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
  • 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
  • As Mark Joseph Stern writes at Slate, the reasoning was ridiculous and tendentious.
    — Ryan Cooper, The Week, 17 Jan. 2022
  • Ghoulish pundits with tendentious takes are a staple of the 24-hour social media and cable news circus.
    — Gerard Baker, WSJ, 30 Jan. 2023
  • 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 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
  • 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
  • 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 move sparked a somewhat tendentious discussion in the Ars virtual office earlier today.
    — Jonathan M. Gitlin, Ars Technica, 18 Jan. 2023
  • 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
  • Thomas’s indictment of Wilson rests on a tendentious interpretation of his writings and speeches.
    — Ruth Marcus, New Yorker, 21 May 2026
  • What remains of the lab-leak theory is half-truths, misrepresentations, and tendentious conjecture.
    — Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 3 June 2021
  • 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

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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