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

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

From Slate ● Oct. 15, 2020

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

The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.

From " The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

Of course it would be a very doubtful kind of merit which commanded the admiration of literary prigs or pedants; but that is not the merit of George Eliot.

From Modern Leaders: Being a Series of Biographical Sketches by Justin McCarthy

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, ain't it, eh?

From Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol III, No 13, 1851 by Various

To-day my Thermos flask in a leather case, in which I carry my lunch, was prigged from the kitchen.

From My War Experiences in Two Continents by Betty Keays-Young Salmon

Ay, my father prigged sair to get one fou day in the month, and he said, ‘Syne if I die sudden, there’s thirty chances to one that I gang to heaven, so it’s worth risking.’

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

"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 Katharine Susannah Prichard

He landed with no more money than the price of a pistol, but he prigged a prancer at Bristol horsefair, and set out upon his last journey.

From A Book of Scoundrels by Charles Whibley

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

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

"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

"What do you mean by prigging my things for your stall?" she demanded angrily.

From The Head Girl at the Gables by Angela Brazil

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