pretentiousness

1. 1.

   lack of elegance as a consequence of being pompous and puffed up with vanity

   Synonymsostentationostentatiousnesspompositypompousnesspuffinesssplashinessinflation

   Broaderinelegance
2. 2.

   the quality of being pretentious (behaving or speaking in such a manner as to create a false appearance of great importance or worth)

   Synonymspretensionlargeness

   Antonymsunpretentiousness

   Broaderunnaturalness

   Narrowerostentation

Other forms of pretentiousness

plural

pretentiousnesses·

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 pretentiousness

What does pretentiousness mean?

pretentiousness means "lack of elegance as a consequence of being pompous and puffed up with vanity". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in pretentiousness?

pretentiousness has 5 syllables: pre-ten-ti-ou-sness. The stress falls on "ti".

What is another word for pretentiousness?

Close synonyms include ostentation, ostentatiousness, pomposity, pompousness, puffiness. 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.

What is the opposite of pretentiousness?

The recorded antonyms are unpretentiousness.

Is pretentiousness a common word?

pretentiousness is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.