pretend

1. 1.

   the enactment of a pretense

   “it was just pretend”

   Synonymsmake-believe

   Broaderpretense

1. 1.

   imagined as in a play

   “the make-believe world of theater”

   “play money”

   “dangling their legs in the water to catch pretend fish”

   Synonymsmake-believe

   Similarunreal

Other forms of pretend

plural

pretends·

past tense

pretended·

present participle

pretending·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about pretend

What does pretend mean?

pretend means "make believe with the intent to deceive". That is the primary sense; the word has 8 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in pretend?

pretend has 2 syllables: pre-tend. The stress falls on "tend". In IPA it is /pɹiˈtɛnd/.

What is another word for pretend?

Close synonyms include feign, sham, affect, dissemble, dissemble. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is pretend a common word?

pretend is banded "Core" — among the few thousand words that carry most english. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.

What rhymes with pretend?

5 words rhyme with pretend. Rhymes are matched on the phonemes from the last stressed vowel onward, which is the definition a reader has in their head.