Word Finder - tentative

definition

A trial; an experiment; an attempt.

definition

Of or pertaining to a trial or trials; essaying; experimental.

definition

Uncertain; subject to future change.

Dean took a deep breath and crept a few tentative steps into the darkness.

He couldn't go home and let Sarah and Connor see how tentative his composure was.

Cynthia Byrne answered in a tentative voice on the first ring.

Venice had already established a tentative hold on the immediate mainland as early as 1339.

Dean skied a few tentative yards down the slope, took a couple of turns, stopped, and assessed himself.

Archeozoic (Archean) Group.The oldest group of rocks, called the Archean, was formerly looked upon, at least in a tentative way, as the original crtist of the earth or its downward extension, much altered by the processes of metamorphism.

Tentative essays in criticism and dissertations on the art of poetry abounded.

Rhangabe made tentative excavations on this site, digging a trench along the north and east sides of the second temple.

Meagre as is the information preserved of the arts, thoughts, and customs of these survivors from the lower Stone Age, it is of value as furnishing even a temporary and tentative means of working out the development of culture on a basis not of conjecture but of fact.

It was therefore a period and a process of transition, fusion, preparation, tentative endeavour.

Among the drawbacks of this temper, which on the whole made for progress, was the rise of a school of excessive scepticism, which, forgetting the value of the accumulated stores of empiricism, despised those degrees of moral certainty that, in so complex a study and so tentative a practice as medicine, must be our portion for the present, and even for a long future, however great the triumphs of medicine may become.

The conjectures of Hermann, in which the Wolfian theory found a modified and tentative application, were presently thrown into the shade by the more trenchant method of Lachmann, who (in two papers read to the Berlin Academy in 1837 and 1841) sought to show that the Iliad was made up of sixteen independent " lays," with various enlargements and interpolations, all finally reduced to order by Peisistratus.

She looks a little tentative, but oddly eager.

After a number of tentative plans, he resolved in 1695 to institute what is often called a "ragged school," supported by public charity.

His earliest tentative was the drawing up of a memoire to Mazarin, showing that of the taxes paid by the people not one-half reached the king.

At present, therefore, classifications of the Hydromedusae have a more or less tentative character, and are liable to revision with increased knowledge of the life-histories of these organisms. Many groups bear at present two names, the one representing the group as defined by polyp-characters, the other as defined by medusa-characters.

Austria, meanwhile, had been making the first tentative essays in constitutional concession, which culminated, in May 1861, in the establishment at Vienna of a Reichsrat for the whole empire, including Hungary.

In this scheme birds are arranged according to what the author considered to be their natural method and sequence; but the result exhibits some unions as ill-assorted as can well be met with in the whole range of tentative arrangements of the class, together with some very unjustifiable divorces.

Buffon, in a cautious, tentative fashion, suggested rather than stated the mutability of species and the influence of the forces of nature in moulding organisms. Immanuel Kant, in his Theory of the Heavens (1755), foreshadowed a theory of the development of unformed matter into the highest types of animals and plants, and suggested that the gradations of structure revealed by comparative anatomy pointed to the existence of blood relationship of all organisms, due to derivation from a common ancestor.

He was now completely subservient to Austria, an Austrian, Count Nugent, being even made commander-in-chief of the army; and for four years he reigned as a despot, every tentative effort at the expression of liberal opinion being ruthlessly suppressed.

Yes, she was fine, though her tone sounded nervous and tentative.

Tentative attempts at export duties have also been made.

Already ere Ecgbert ascended the throne of Kent the new enemy had made his first tentative appearance on the British shore.

Austria at last began to see that a policy of coercion was useless and dangerous, and made tentative efforts at conciliation.

Mill in the tentative approach to theism found in his posthumous volume (Three Essays on Religion; 1874).

A notable feature of the conference was the presence of the Swedish bishop of Kalmar, who presented a letter from the archbishop of Upsala, as a tentative advance towards closer relations between the Anglican Church and the Evangelical Church of Sweden.

But the general result of such reconstructions is tentative.

The term of office of the latter was marked by the first tentative efforts to modify the high protective system by which British trade was hampered, especially by the Reciprocity of Duties Act (1823), a modification of the Navigation Acts, by which British and foreign shipping were placed on an equal footing, while the right to impose restrictive duties on ships of powers refusing to reciprocate was retained.

The union of the negative and the positive elements in his work has caused historians no little perplexity, and we cannot quite save the philosopher's consistency unless we regard some of the doctrines attributed to him by Xenophon as merely tentative and provisional.

The first stage at which we can distinguish Plato's ethical view from that of Socrates is presented in the Protagoras, where he makes a serious, though clearly tentative effort to define the object of that knowledge which he with his master regards as the essence of all virtue.

Their proceedings were very cautious and tentative; they excited the curiosity and interest of even the more intelligent Chinese by their clocks, their globes and maps, their books of European engravings, and by Ricci's knowledge of mathematics, including dialling and the projection of maps.

The increasing number of her adherents, and her inexperience of government on such a vast and complicated scale, obliged her to comply with political necessity and to adopt the system of the state and its social customs. The Church was no longer a fraternity, on a footing of equality, with freedom of belief and tentative as to dogma, but an authoritative aristocratic hierarchy.

The peace of Amiens, which cost him Egypt, could only seem to him a temporary truce; whilst he was gradually extending his authority in Italy, the cradle of his race, by the union of Piedmont, and by his tentative plans regarding Genoa, Parma, Tuscany and Naples.

Dr Wallis Budge visited several of the far southern sites and made some tentative excavations, but no extensive explorations were undertaken until an unexpected event produced a sudden outburst of activity.

The central and southern Sudan is therefore almost a virgin field for the archaeologist, but the exploration of Lower Nubia has made it possible to write a tentative preface to the new chapters still unrevealed.

His policy, therefore, was necessarily tentative and ambiguous, and might very readily be misinterpreted.

The statute was preceded by tentative provisions of the same kind enacted in the reigns of Edward VI.

Our knowledge presents so many gaps, and the mode of action of many remedies is so obscure and imperfectly understood, that any arrangement adopted must be more or less tentative in character.

They are essentially tentative, and exhibit with unusual clearness the manner in which the difficulties of a received theory force on a wider and more comprehensive view.

Agreement was final reached on a tentative location for our Shangri La; Keene, New Hampshire.

Just then, one of the attending firemen tested the hose with a tentative burst, scattering a curbside group that screamed in delight.

Have the voice actors been decided, or is it tentative?

With gentle guidance, our tentative beginnings drawn out, examined, put together, improved.

The numbers of users in these categories is too small to draw more than the following tentative conclusions.

All online workshop schedules and deadlines were set-up as " tentative " pending confirmation from both CDAC Online staffers and project participants.

For twelve years he will remain tentative and perhaps even diffident in the elaboration of his conviction.

With only a lap of wet practice and me on inters, I was tentative to say the least!

The differences found between the teacher groups enable us to draw a tentative psycho-educational profile of teachers who are successful at social mainstreaming.

One atheist philosopher has made a tentative step toward belief.

These tentative suggestions are put forward to generate discussion.