disapproval If you say that someone has pretensions, you disapprove of them because they claim or pretend that they are more important than they really are. Her wide-eyed innocence soon exposes the pretensions of the art world We like him for his honesty, his lack of pretension
a false or unsupportable quality the advancing of a claim; "his pretension to the crown"; "the town still puts forward pretensions as a famous resort
A claim made, whether true or false; a right alleged or assumed; a holding out the appearance of possessing a certain character; as, pretensions to scholarship