prig

What if I sounded like a moralizing, self-righteous prig?

From Salon ● Dec. 30, 2023

The Professor, Sonia’s father, is a selfish and pompous prig who hates Vanya as much as Vanya hates him.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 24, 2023

I feel a bit like a stiff old prig myself even bringing this all up, but there’s one more thing that bugged me, which is how many times the word rake or rakish was used.

From Slate ● Feb. 7, 2021

Of course, when regarded as a 20-something prig squatting rent-free on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s land, Thoreau sounds like the dude you’d least like to be quarantined with.

From Washington Post ● Apr. 6, 2020

“Poor Bors. I hope he was not too much of a prig about it?”

From "The Once and Future King" by T. H. White

There is nothing like her humor, or Shakespeare’s, or Dante’s, or Dickens’s or Dostoyevsky’s, in ancient tragedy or in our young Miltonic prigs who are writing intense novels just now.

From New York Times ● Oct. 21, 2021

“We are all a bunch of prigs in Washington, after all.”

From Washington Post ● Apr. 25, 2018

At the same time the intellectual elite—particularly the Bloomsbury set—took to ridiculing as prigs and bores the Victorian giants who had built up the economic and moral capital which they lived off.

From Economist ● Oct. 5, 2017

P prigs In Middlemarch, George Eliot has Fred Vincy make the splendid observation that “correct English is the slang of prigs”.

From The Guardian ● Mar. 25, 2016

A fine set of solemn prigs we are getting!”

From Satires And Profanities by G. W. (George William) Foote

"I might have prigged this box of figs," the damsel said good-naturedly, "and you'd never have turned round."

From Burlesques by William Makepeace Thackeray

In coorse these is first prigged raw, and sold to gents in my line of bis'ness, who either manufacters them themselves, or sells 'em to gents as does.

From The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 by Various

Now there was nothing to detect Pomona Road along - None faked a cly, nor cracked a crib, Nor prigged a wipe, nor told a fib,— Minds cultivated and select Slip rarely into wrong!

From Ban and Arriere Ban by Andrew Lang

“We prigged wi’ Tammas no to gang to the manse till we was sure the minister was living.

From The Little Minister by J. M. (James Matthew) Barrie

The pocket-book you prigged contained the letters I wanted.

From Jack Sheppard A Romance by William Harrison Ainsworth

There! that's for you brats; just a little taste to give you a relish for prigging; it's a thing you'll take to more kindly if it's made agreeable to you.

From The Mysteries of Paris, Volume 4 of 6 by Eugène Sue

Nothing like slang, Ned, with the police or the prigging gentry.

From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 33, July, 1860 by Various

The drying and bleaching linen was an unceasing attraction to rascals like Autolycus, who had a "pugging tooth"—that is, a prigging tooth.

From Old-Time Gardens Newly Set Forth by Alice Morse Earle

Next minute there was me, my very arms prigging wi’ him to think better o’t, and him standing ready to loup, his knees bent, and not a tremble in them.

From The Little Minister by J. M. (James Matthew) Barrie

I have not, as you somewhat broadly insinuate, been prigging bits of your matchless rhetoric in order to give currency and flavour to my own more maudlin articles.

From Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 60, No. 373, November 1846 by Various