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
• Here, Franklin’s life is merely the pretext for a #MeToo-era tract.
  — Armond White, National Review, 11 Aug. 2021
• 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
• Wolff says Trump toyed with the idea of postponing the election, using the Floyd protests as a pretext.
  — Washington Post, 17 July 2021
• 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
• The city is at the heart of the pretext provided by Mr. Abbas to postpone elections.
  — Patrick Kingsley, New York Times, 29 Apr. 2021
• 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
• The pretext is subject to so much discretion, Kenney said, that a great deal of bias can work its way in.
  — NBC News, 12 May 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
• Myanmar uses the fighting as a pretext to blame Bangladesh for ongoing unrest and to defend its treatment of the Rohingya as a legitimate security rationale.
  — Nasir Uddin, The Conversation, 3 Sep. 2024
• What remains to be seen, however, is whether the change in leadership would provide a convenient pretext for her government to abandon a $14 billion digital wallet cash handout program.
  — Patpicha Tanakasempipat / Bloomberg, TIME, 16 Aug. 2024

Last Updated: 22 Oct 2024