Pretentious means trying to seem grander or cleverer than you are. A pretentious film, pretentious language, sound pretentious.
The accusation is about the gap between the claim and the substance, so calling something pretentious says the ambition was not earned. It is a favourite word of people who mistrust ambition of any kind, which is worth remembering.
1adjectivepretentiousTrying to seem grander or cleverer than you are.
“The restaurant was pretentious, with tiny portions on huge plates and a menu full of French words.”
pretentious is a quality.
French pretentieux comes from pretention, a claim, from Latin praetendere, to hold out or claim.
Proto-Indo-European
*tend-
Latin
praetēnsus — false or hypocritical profession
French
prétentieux
English, today
pretentious
From French prétentieux, from prétention, from Latin praetēnsus (“false or hypocritical profession”), past participle of praetendō. Note that pretentious is spelled with a ‘t’, unlike related pretense, pretension. This is due to the French spelling: *-sious does not occur as an English suffix, though -sion and -tion both do.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA