noun
definition
A trial; an experiment; an attempt.
adjective
definition
Of or pertaining to a trial or trials; essaying; experimental.
definition
Uncertain; subject to future change.
Examples of tentative in a Sentence
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.
Yes, she was fine, though her tone sounded nervous and tentative.
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.
Already ere Ecgbert ascended the throne of Kent the new enemy had made his first tentative appearance on the British shore.
Tentative attempts at export duties have also been made.
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).
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 statute was preceded by tentative provisions of the same kind enacted in the reigns of Edward VI.
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.
Anyone with experience of upmarket hotels may feel a little tentative pulling the desk away from the wall.
This in mind, ones conclusions must be treated as somewhat tentative and contingent.
Taylor is candid about the fact that some of the best theories we have at present are rather tentative.
The study described its findings as ' necessarily tentative ' because of major information gaps.
Tutors can be too tentative or not ' visible ' enough in discussions.
The " descent " reference is highly tentative, too.
These are large questions; comment can only be very tentative.
I must admit to being a bit tentative with these kinds of claims.
However, her commitment to Italian ecclesiastical initiatives remained tentative.
Here the violinist occasionally seems tentative, not quite the match of the gutsy pianist.
Hiden, Sharpe, Harte, Kewell looked tentative out wide at best.
Hogarth made tentative researches on behalf of the Egypt Exploration Fund and the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies in 1895; and a German expedition worked for two years (1898-1899).
Obviously tentative, and with limits and ultimate interpretation to be determined elsewhere, it failed to bear fruit till the Renaissance, and then by the irony of fate to the discrediting of Aristotle.