tenuous

Etymology

It is formed irregularly from Latin tenuis (“thin, slender, fine”) with the suffix -ous;^[2][3][4][5] the form true to the Latin stem, tenuious, is now obsolete or rare,^[2][3][6] and Ayto describes tenuous as an alteration of it.^[7] Dictionary.com instead analyses it as tenuity with -ous.^[8] The Latin adjective also meant "trifling, insignificant, poor, low in rank".^[3] It comes from Proto-Indo-European *ten- (“to stretch”),^[9][7][3] and is related to thin and its Germanic cognates, as well as to Ancient Greek ταναός (tanaós, “stretched out, long”).^[7][10][11]

Earliest recorded meaning

Thin in consistency; sparse, rarefied, insubstantial: 1597, in a surgical treatise by P. Lowe.^[2][5][12] Etymonline also dates the word to the 1590s.^[3]

Semantic evolution

The physical senses came first: thin in consistency (1597) and then thin or slender in form (1656, in Blount's Glossographia).^[2] Johnson (1755) gave only "thin; small; minute".^[13] The figurative sense, of slight importance, weak or flimsy, is recorded from before 1817, in T. Dwight's Theology,^[2][5][3] and is now the main one.^[14][9]

Timeline

• 1597 – thin in consistency; rarefied.^[2][5]
• 1656 – thin or slender in form.^[2]
• before 1817 – figurative, slight, weak, flimsy.^[2][5][3]

Meanings

Adjective

1. Weak or without much substance; flimsy: a tenuous claim to the throne.^[9][14][12]
2. Precarious or insecure: a tenuous grip on power.^[9]
3. Long and thin; slender or fine.^[9][14][12]
4. Having a thin consistency; rarefied or not dense.^[9][14][12]

Word family

• tenuously
• tenuousness

Related words

• attenuate
• extenuate
• tenuity
• thin
• tenuious

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d e f g Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
4. ^ Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
5. ^ a b c d e Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
6. ^ Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
7. ^ a b c Ayto, John (2005), Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z, 2nd ed., London: A & C Black
8. ^ Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
9. ^ a b c d e f The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
10. ^ Cresswell, Julia (2021), Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
11. ^ Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
12. ^ a b c d Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
13. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
14. ^ a b c d Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins