sententious
1
9.9
- adjective
- /sɛnˈtɛnʃəs/
- Formal
:
sentencioso
- The author’s sententious tone made her novel feel more like a lecture than an entertaining read.
Examples
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His sententious remarks often turned simple conversations into long, moralizing lectures.
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What has appeared in some eyes to be mere sententious detailing in the painting is, in fact, a complex symbolic and iconographic chain representing ideals and realities.
Academic text (1992) -
After several trivial sententious pronouncements, that has never been her trouble.
Fiction book (1993) -
The jokes that are presented may not convey that the shop is a serious establishment; conversely, sententious self-made signs may also keep customers away.
Academic text (1995) -
Both had been reduced to pathetic phantoms of their former selves, the lawyer no longer sententious, the princess no longer uproarious.
Academic text (1999) -
Her father, that good but sententious man, had once said to her, "Your trouble is that you snatch at life -- you can't wait for anything in the fullness of time."
Fiction book (1993) -
He dresses out his doubled chiasmus in the sententious, pointed, or curt style and various forms of correction and punning.
Academic text (2001) -
The poetry that comes from the mouths of characters like Armytage tends to be neoclassically sententious, as when he says to the young narrator of "The Ruined Cottage," PREFORMATTED TABLE
Academic text (1990) -
For example, when I heard Ren Char read his sententious aphorisms with an accent that struck me as at once comical and obscene, as the betrayal of a truth, it ruined, in no small measure, an admiration of my youth.
Blog text (10) -
She found his sententious style too pompous, making it hard to enjoy the otherwise interesting story.
Antonyms
How Moralizing
Surface Forms
Morphology
sententious = sentence (opaque) = sentent + ious
Although built from the Latin stem meaning 'opinion/saying' plus the adjectival suffix '-ious', the modern sense 'pithy, moralizing, or pompous' is not a meaning B1 learners would reliably derive from the base 'sentence'.
Etymology
Sententious comes from the Latin sententia meaning 'opinion' and from sentire meaning 'to feel' or 'to think', and it is the same root behind sentence and sentiment. So a sententious remark is like a short, strong opinion—brief words that try to teach or sound moral, often sounding self-important.