priggish
Americanadjective
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of priggish
Explanation
Priggish people are snobby and self-righteous. An overly prim and proper movie character who's always telling other people what they should do is priggish. If you offer your opinion on how your friends should live their lives, and especially if you're very uptight and snooty, people will think you're priggish. The adjective priggish comes from the eighteenth century prig, "precise in speech and manners," which was also used to mean "religiously devout." Earlier, a prig was "a petty thief."
Vocabulary lists containing priggish
Unit 3: Compelling Evidence
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The Witch of Blackbird Pond
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"Uprising" by Margaret Peterson Haddix
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
All the characters the excellent Mr. Felciano plays are sinister, selfish or generally priggish.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 5, 2026
He’s so insufferably priggish that at school his name, William Orser, has by common consent been elided to the nonexistent word “Worser,” just to drive him crazy.
From New York Times ● Aug. 12, 2022
Once criticized for a sense of rectitude so priggish it began to appear perverse, Starr course-corrected by defending Jeffrey Epstein and then Donald Trump.
From Slate ● Aug. 15, 2021
Throughout the pandemic, Clapton has joined in criticism of the COVID-19 lockdown, as if governments were just 1960s priggish parents grounding kids for smoking grass.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 23, 2021
Forgetting that he’d ever been way behind the fashion curve, he was appalled, in some priggish, nouveau riche kind of way, that certain passengers appeared in the dining room in slacks and sneakers.
From "Endgame" by Frank Brady
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
