WORD OF THE DAY: TENUOUS
adjective | TEN-yoo-us
Something described as tenuous is flimsy, weak, or uncertain.
// The theater had a tenuous existence for years, but today is on much more solid financial footing.
EXAMPLES OF TENUOUS
“While more non-screen-based interactive technology could be an antidote to our screen-obsessed society, it’s an extremely tenuous link to more human interaction …” — Jennifer Pattinson Tuohy, The Verge, 4 May 2026.
DID YOU KNOW?
Lean into the history of tenuous and you’ll find that the word comes to English from the Latin adjective tenuis, meaning “fine-drawn, thin, narrow, or slight,” and is a relative of thin. Like that more familiar word, tenuous has a wide array of meanings: it can describe a literal thinness, as in “a silkworm’s tenuous threads,” or rarity (the opposite of density), as in “a tenuous fluid,” or it can describe things that are figuratively thin or flimsy. If one team in a game has a tenuous lead, either team still has a chance at winning. If there is only a tenuous connection between two events, those events are likely unrelated.
Merriam Webster Dictionary
