tendency

noun

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.”

   “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.”

   “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. An organised unit or faction within a larger political organisation.

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

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

   “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.”