priggish

American  

[prig-ish] / ˈprɪg ɪʃ /

adjective

1. fussy about trivialities or propriety, especially in a self-righteous or irritating manner.

   At the beginning of the book, Eustace is an unpleasant, unlikable, and priggish character.

   He never softened his message to please genteel tastes or priggish scruples.

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Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• unpriggish
  adjective
• priggishness
  noun
• priggishly
  adverb

Etymology

Origin of priggish

prig ¹ ( def. ) + -ish ¹

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."

Example Sentences

All the characters the excellent Mr. Felciano plays are sinister, selfish or generally priggish.

From The Wall Street Journal • Jun. 5, 2026

Woolf, like several other characters in “Run,” is based on a real person; Cocker-Norris, whom Oyelowo renders with an amusingly priggish persnickety-ness, is not.

From Washington Post • Sep. 13, 2022

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

He grinned as if I were being unaccountably priggish.

From "A Walk in the Woods" by Bill Bryson