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

Are you as warmhearted as you say you are, or are you just a crusty old prig who wants to watch old empires while eating your chips and seven-bean dip?

From Washington Post ● Mar. 27, 2023

In comparison, Schultz comes off as less of a martinet and more of a prig in the trial transcripts.

From Slate ● Oct. 15, 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

Throughout America’s renewed mania for book banning, I’ve been disappointed that “Rule of the Bone” hasn’t inspired more prigs to start collecting dry sticks.

From Washington Post ● Jan. 8, 2023

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

When Stiers played Winchester for comedy, his clipped diction and dry delivery made for one of television’s greatest prigs.

From Slate ● Mar. 4, 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

Since you've swotted up into the Upper Sixth, you've turned into a very good imitation of the prigs you associate with.

From Sinister Street, vol. 1 by Compton MacKenzie

And when attacked By rage of bibliophilic greed, You prigged that small Quantin Ovide, Although I prized it.

From In the Track of the Bookworm by Irving Browne

“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

I never thought no more about it till I 'card as 'ow a will had been prigged, and as 'ow you 'ad got the tin wot t'other cove ought to 'ave 'ad.

From A Woman's Burden by Fergus Hume

I prigged it; Simmy here whipped it into pretty Mary's reticule, which she, I suppose, never looked into till the row came; and you claimed it—a regular merry-go-round, eh?

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

And the Abbot declared that "when nobody twigged it, Some rascal or other had popped in and prigged it."

From The Book of Humorous Verse by Carolyn Wells

"Dont'ee tell her of my being here, Mr. Fenwick, and nobody shan't ever come anigh this place again,—not in the way of prigging anything."

From The Vicar of Bullhampton by Anthony Trollope

You could imagine him trotting up and down in the character of an unsuspicious old gentleman with his handkerchief hanging out of his pocket, that his scholars might show their skill in prigging a wipe.

From From the Easy Chair, series 2 by George William Curtis

Aha!" quoth Godby the peddler, winking roguish eye, "On the prigging lay perchance, cull, or peradventure the mill-ken?

From Black Bartlemy's Treasure by Jeffery Farnol

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

The cove was lagged for prigging a   peter with several stretch of dobbin from a drag; the   fellow was transported for stealing a trunk, containing   several yards of ribband, from a waggon.

From 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose