From Medieval Latin tendentia, from tendens, present participle of tendō.

• enPR: tĕnʹdən-sē
  • (Received Pronunciation, General American, Canada) IPA^(key): /ˈtɛn.dən.si/

    • Audio (General American):

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    • Audio (California):

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  • (General Australian, New Zealand) IPA^(key): /ˈten.dən.si/
• (North India) IPA^(key): /ʈɛɳˈɖɛnsi/
• (South India) IPA^(key): /ˈʈɛɳɖənsi/
• Hyphenation: ten‧den‧cy

tendency (plural tendencies)

1. A likelihood of behaving in a particular way or going in a particular direction; a tending toward.

   Denim has a tendency to fade.

   I have a tendency to get bored after the first half an hour of a movie.

   There's a common tendency among first-game visitors to a casino to bet overcautiously.

   • 1951 April, Stirling Everard, “A Matter of Pedigree”, in Railway Magazine, number 600, page 274:

     In some details, Britannia shows the trend towards American practice that was already apparent in later L.M.S.R. designs—for example, in regard to the mounting of the cab—and this tendency has been further developed in the footwalk with deep sideplating, mounted on the boiler, in place of the framing and splashers usual in British practice in the past.

   • 2025 June 17, Shane Duquette, Marco Walker-Ng, “What is Skinny Fat? And How to Know If You Are”, in Bony to Beastly‎^[1], archived from the original on 15 August 2025:

     It seems that people with an ancestral history of enduring famines develop a tendency to store more body fat, becoming overfat even when they aren’t overweight.

2. (politics) An organised unit or faction within a larger political organisation.
   • 1974, James Boggs, Grace Lee Boggs, Revolution and Evolution, NYU Press, →ISBN, page 134:

     Mao launched the struggle against the vulgar materialist tendency within the party as early as 1937.

   • 1997, S. Onslow, Backbench Debate within the Conservative Party and its Influence on British Foreign Policy, 1948-57, Springer, →ISBN, page 234:

     In stark contrast to the Europeanist tendency within the party and the Suez Group, this group had a short history.

   • 2013, Richard Gillespie, Lourdes Lopez Nieto, Michael Waller, Factional Politics and Democratization, Routledge, →ISBN, page 83:

     It reinforced the position of the conformist tendency within the party, since the majority of the candidates were old politicians, many of them members of Papandreou's centre-left CU faction back in the mid-1960s.

• inclination
• disposition
• propensity
• penchant
• trend