| Library / English Dictionary |
PRETEXT
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
An artful or simulated semblance
Example:
under the guise of friendship he betrayed them
Synonyms:
guise; pretence; pretense; pretext
Classified under:
Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects
Hypernyms ("pretext" is a kind of...):
color; colour; gloss; semblance (an outward or token appearance or form that is deliberately misleading)
Sense 2
Meaning:
Something serving to conceal plans; a fictitious reason that is concocted in order to conceal the real reason
Synonyms:
pretext; stalking-horse
Classified under:
Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents
Hypernyms ("pretext" is a kind of...):
dissembling; feigning; pretence; pretense (pretending with intention to deceive)
Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "pretext"):
putoff (a pretext for delay or inaction)
Context examples:
Ruth's two girl-cousins were visiting her from San Rafael, and Mrs. Morse, under pretext of entertaining them, was pursuing her plan of surrounding Ruth with young people.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
I passed up the street, looking as I went at all the houses to the right hand and to the left; but I could discover no pretext, nor see an inducement to enter any.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
I managed to see him on a plausible pretext, but I seemed to read in his dark, deepset, brooding eyes that he was perfectly aware of my true business.
(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Adele was not easy to teach that day; she could not apply: she kept running to the door and looking over the banisters to see if she could get a glimpse of Mr. Rochester; then she coined pretexts to go downstairs, in order, as I shrewdly suspected, to visit the library, where I knew she was not wanted; then, when I got a little angry, and made her sit still, she continued to talk incessantly of her ami, Monsieur Edouard Fairfax de Rochester, as she dubbed him (I had not before heard his prenomens), and to conjecture what presents he had brought her: for it appears he had intimated the night before, that when his luggage came from Millcote, there would be found amongst it a little box in whose contents she had an interest.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
It is one of my faults, that though my tongue is sometimes prompt enough at an answer, there are times when it sadly fails me in framing an excuse; and always the lapse occurs at some crisis, when a facile word or plausible pretext is specially wanted to get me out of painful embarrassment.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
I felt the truth of these words; and I drew from them the certain inference, that if I were so far to forget myself and all the teaching that had ever been instilled into me, as—under any pretext—with any justification—through any temptation—to become the successor of these poor girls, he would one day regard me with the same feeling which now in his mind desecrated their memory.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
