How to Use pretext in a Sentence

pretext

noun

• She went back to her friend's house on the pretext that she had forgotten her purse.
• Ukraine and the West say this is a baseless pretext for war.
  — Fox News, 1 May 2022
• The rule quickly caused pretext stops by the LAPD to plummet.
  — Noah Goldberg, Los Angeles Times, 20 Dec. 2023
• The play isn’t the thing but simply the pretext for disaster.
  — Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times, 14 Aug. 2023
• Holiday’s drug use is a pretext for both the F.B.I. and Daniels.
  — Wesley Morris, New York Times, 12 Oct. 2022
• But some in the party had dismissed that as a pretext to jam Biden through.
  — Aaron Blake, Washington Post, 22 July 2024
• The rebels, led by Mr. Kagame, said the Hutu extremists downed the plane as a pretext for genocide.
  — Abdi Latif Dahir, New York Times, 7 Apr. 2024
• On the other hand, the pandemic was little more than a pretext in the first place.
  — Samuel Goldman, The Week, 6 Apr. 2022
• In essence, Pence was being asked to endorse a stack of forgeries and then use them as pretext for a coup.
  — Amy Davidson Sorkin, The New Yorker, 13 Aug. 2023
• Ukraine and its allies call that a false pretext for a war of aggression.
  — Reuters, NBC News, 31 May 2022
• Prosecutors said the teenagers were lured to the same park under the pretext of a gang meeting.
  — Salvador Rizzo, Washington Post, 2 July 2022
• To be clear: Everyone in the world of academia understands this to be a pretext, and a shabby one at that.
  — The Editors, National Review, 8 Mar. 2023
• Such claims could be used as a pretext for escalating the war.
  — John Bacon, USA TODAY, 2 Nov. 2022
• Western leaders dismissed the claims as a false pretext for the attack.
  — chicagotribune.com, 24 Mar. 2022
• Analysts see those as the seeds of a pretext that Maduro could use to postpone or cancel the election at the last minute.
  — David Shortell, CNN, 21 July 2024
• This isn’t the first time the state has cut off internet access under the pretext of exams.
  — Ananya Bhattacharya, Quartz, 27 Sep. 2021
• His gut tells him that all this talk about the cost of living is simply a pretext for owners to make more money.
  — New York Times, 20 Aug. 2022
• The police beat men like him on little pretext, and fists land in his face, on rugby days, for no reason at all.
  — New York Times, 5 Dec. 2021
• Russia still bans protests on the pretext that mass gatherings are a health hazard.
  — Ann M. Simmons, WSJ, 11 Nov. 2023
• In some departments, such stops have been a pretext to search vehicles for drugs or weapons.
  — Editors, USA TODAY, 31 Oct. 2021
• Cyrus believes this was all a pretext for ending the arrangement.
  — Charles Bethea, The New Yorker, 13 Feb. 2024
• The pretext might be different, but the objective would be the same: subduing Ukraine.
  — Samuel Charap, Foreign Affairs, 13 July 2023
• This continued for over a year, after which the scammer asked for $5,000 on the pretext of paying a credit-card bill.
  — Bart Ziegler, WSJ, 8 Sep. 2022
• Leach, without any pretext, told Salisbury to buy a plane ticket to Lubbock and come to a practice.
  — Kevin Reynolds, The Salt Lake Tribune, 16 Dec. 2022
• Finding fault is a pretext. Re: Annoying: What about dads?
  — Carolyn Hax, Washington Post, 16 Jan. 2024
• The narrative pretext for all these series-blending shenanigans is charming enough, in a low-stakes teen-movie kind of way.
  — Los Angeles Times, 14 Dec. 2021
• If Putin was looking for a pretext to cut off countries that have supported Ukraine, this could serve that function.
  — CBS News, 27 Apr. 2022
• But this event was mostly a pretext to write a story and make Dustin a fictional character.
  — Jamie Lang, Variety, 17 Jan. 2022
• In the case of Sandy Hook, Jones aired programming for years that the slaughter of first graders was a hoax contrived as a pretext for gun control and the children and parents were actors.
  — Hartford Courant, 20 Sep. 2022
• The shareholders argue Musk used the bots issue as a pretext for backing out of the deal or renegotiating the sale price.
  — Jacob Carpenter, Fortune, 27 May 2022

Last Updated: 28 Sep 2024