Other forms: pretending, pretends, pretended
To pretend is to act as though something is true when it is not. Pretend to be asleep, pretend you did not see, let's pretend.
It takes an infinitive or a that-clause — pretend to be ill, pretend that nothing happened — and both are ordinary. Children's play is the innocent end of the word and deception is the other, and only context says which. As an adjective it is informal and children's: a pretend gun, pretend money. Note the noun is pretence in British English and pretense in American, and that a pretender is somebody claiming a throne, which is a different and much older use.
1verbpretendTo act as though something is true when it is not.
“He pretended not to have heard the question.”
2verbimagineIn play, to imagine something is real.
“They were pretending the sofa was a boat.”
3adjectivechildrensNot real, in children's play.
“It is a pretend telephone and it makes a real noise.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
pretend is a way of acting as if.
Latin praetendere meant to stretch something out in front — prae-, before, plus tendere, to stretch, the same verb behind tent and extend. To pretend was to hold something up in front of the truth, which is a precise description of what pretending does.
Proto-Indo-European
*tend-
Anglo-Norman
pretendre
English, today
pretend
Built from
From Anglo-Norman pretendre. From Anglo-Norman pretendre, Middle French pretendre (French prétendre (“to claim, demand”)), from Latin praetendo (“to put forward, hold out, pretend”), from prae- (“pre-”) + tendō (“stretch”); see tend.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA