prig

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

But the benevolent smile lurking under the pre-World War I mustache is deceiving: The man is a sanctimonious prig who siphons all the fun out of life.

From New York Times ● Mar. 1, 2019

Miraculously, Austen is able to pull off such endings without coming across as a prig.

From Slate ● May 11, 2016

Before this happened, I had all the makings of a fine young prig, with a highly developed and thoroughly inflexible sense of rectitude.

From Salon ● Apr. 2, 2016

“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

There is enough and to spare of blame ready in any balanced mind for either of these great writers, but they can do without the admiration of wooden-headed prigs, however able.

From The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, October 1879 by Various

"You don't mean to say that old woman prigged it?" asked Hurd.

From The Opal Serpent by Hume, Fergus

W’en I’d prigged enough o’ wipes to pay my fare down, I comed away,—an’ here I am.”

From The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands by Ballantyne, R. M. (Robert Michael)

"She wouldn't give me a photograph for you, Michael—said you'd never know her—so I prigged this from her sitting-room last time I was there."

From The Black Opal by Prichard, Katharine Susannah

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 Wells, Carolyn

"Hallo!" shouted one of those at the cards, "here's Jack Brereton has prigged the ace of hearts."

From Willy Reilly The Works of William Carleton, Volume One by Carleton, William

A walking morte is one unmarried: a doxe, a dell, and a kynchin morte, are all females; and a kynchen co is a young boy not thoroughly instructed in the art of canting and prigging.

From Microcosmography or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters by Earle, John

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

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

"And instead o' the raging I was prigging for," the soft-hearted maid told her friends, "she gave me a flannel petticoat!"

From Sentimental Tommy The Story of His Boyhood by Barrie, J. M. (James Matthew)

"Yes; but you'd have to move, and if we took an inventory, I think we"d find that Mr. Beeton has been prigging little things out of the rooms here and there.

From The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition by Kipling, Rudyard

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 Sue, Eugène