Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Dishonest; thievish.
  • Conceited; coxcombical; affected.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Like a prig; conceited; pragmatical.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Like a prig.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective exaggeratedly proper

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

prig +‎ -ish.

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Examples

  • Of course it sounds what is commonly called priggish when a man, in the style of Mr. Barlow, is always imploring the boy who wins a race or gets a prize to turn his thoughts higher and to take no credit to himself for what is only a piece of good fortune, and is not so great a performance after all.

    The Silent Isle Arthur Christopher Benson 1893

  • The recollection of the inner life, in which I was wont to think out such sayings, has made me more tolerant with so-called priggish children than most of their elders are prone to be.

    Marion Harland's autobiography : the story of a long life, 1910

  • She uttered everything in a deliberate, old-fashioned way, with precise articulation, and a certain manner that an English mother would have called priggish, but which was only the outcome of Scotch stiffness, her father's rebukes, and her own sense of propriety.

    Sir Gibbie George MacDonald 1864

  • He has thus refined his notion of alterity from a "priggish" one that would not acknowledge any resemblance (14) between ancient paederasty and modern homosexuality, to an alterity that now "acknowledge [s], promote [s], and support [s] a heterogeneity of queer identities, past and present"

    The Uses and Abuses of Historicism: Halperin and Shelley on the Otherness of Ancient Greek Sexuality 2006

  • Nonetheless I want to ask how one knows when one is being "priggish" about one's alterity?

    The Uses and Abuses of Historicism: Halperin and Shelley on the Otherness of Ancient Greek Sexuality 2006

  • When I called my earlier attitude "priggish," what

    'That Obscure Object of Historical Desire' 2006

  • (Similarly, the "priggish" Hoover, with his "love of publicity," "knew how to put on a political show" and "liked to jump in, and find a moral justification for doing so later.")

    FDR & the Depression: The Big Debate Friedman, Benjamin M. 2007

  • It is almost certainly Siegfried Sassoon's last childhood effort at composition before a new tutor, the hearty athletic Cambridge graduate Clarence Hamilton, made him feel that writing poetry was rather "priggish".

    Archive 2006-11-01 Rus Bowden 2006

  • It is almost certainly Siegfried Sassoon's last childhood effort at composition before a new tutor, the hearty athletic Cambridge graduate Clarence Hamilton, made him feel that writing poetry was rather "priggish".

    News at Eleven: This find is of particular interest Rus Bowden 2006

  • Anybody that looks kind of priggish seems to be fair game.

    CNN Transcript Jun 8, 2003 2003

Comments

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  • Dishonest, thief-like

    March 23, 2009