- claim
- claim vb *demand, exact, requireAntonyms: disclaim: renounceContrasted words: disavow, disown, dis- acknowledge (see affirmative verbs at ACKNOWLEDGE): reject, repudiate, refuse (see DECLINE vb): concede, allow, *grant: waive, cede, *relinquish: *forgo, abnegateclaim n Claim, title, pretension, pretense are comparable when they denote an actual or alleged right to demand something as one's possession, quality, power, or prerogative.Claim carries the strongest implication of any of these terms of a demand for recognition; only the context can indicate whether that demand is regarded as justifiable or not or whether the right is actually asserted by the person involved{
though the house was legally the daughter's, the father, as the one who had paid for it and had taken care of all taxes and insurance, had a moral claim to live there the rest of his life
}{intelligent persons cannot accept the claims made for many patent medicines
}{he advanced no claim to scholarly knowledge
}{searching for truth as against all the claims and all the counterclaims of all the partisans— Lippmann
}{liberty itself became ... a principle of anarchy rather than a body of claims to be read in the context of the social process— Laski
}Claim also occurs in a more concrete sense as denoting the property or possession for which one sets up a claim{stake out a claim in an oil field
}Title (see also NAME), on the other hand, distinctively imputes validity or justice to the claim, or its substantiation in law or in reason{his distinguished success as the governor of a great state gives him a title to our support of his candidacy for president
}{many of the people who masquerade under the name of "men of science" have no sort of title to that name— Ellis
}{they were discussed by men each of whom, in his own way, had some title to speak on them— Sat. Review
}{gifts and excellences to which Wordsworth can make no pretension— Arnold
}and less often, in place of title{the courtier, the trader, and the scholar, should all have an equal pretension to the denomination of a gentleman— Steele
}Very often, however, pretension connotes a lack of warrant or a weakness in the claim and may attribute to it a measure of hypocrisy or deceit{this court disclaims all pretensions to such power— John Marshall
}{his pretension, deftly circulated by press agents, was that he was a man of brilliant and polished mind— Mencken
}Pretense has become rare in the sense of claim (see PRETENSE). Usually the term applies to an asserted claim{Marlborough calmly and politely showed that the pretense was unreasonable— Macaulay
}but it may apply to a claim that is tacitly made in that one is assumed by another to be something that one is not or to have a right that one does not actually possess{she knew that she was in the house under false pretenses, for her host and hostess had warmly welcomed her as a daughter of old friends of the same name
}
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
