Crossword clues for puritan
puritan
- Mrs. Grundy
- Libertine's opposite
- Adheres to strict religious principles
- A person excessively concerned about propriety and decorum
- Opposed to sensual pleasures
- 1606 play of the Shakespeare apocrypha, with "The"
- Goody cake getting brown
- Moralist capturing exposed criminal
- Extreme moralist
- Strictly moral person
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Puritan \Pu"ri*tan\, a. Of or pertaining to the Puritans; resembling, or characteristic of, the Puritans.
Puritan \Pu"ri*tan\, n. [From Purity.]
-
(Eccl. Hist.) One who, in the time of Queen Elizabeth and the first two Stuarts, opposed traditional and formal usages, and advocated simpler forms of faith and worship than those established by law; -- originally, a term of reproach. The Puritans formed the bulk of the early population of New England.
Note: The Puritans were afterward distinguished as Political Puritans, Doctrinal Puritans, and Puritans in Discipline.
--Hume. -
One who is scrupulous and strict in his religious life; -- often used reproachfully or in contempt; one who has overstrict notions.
She would make a puritan of the devil.
--Shak.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1560s, "opponent of Anglican hierarchy," later applied opprobriously to "person in Church of England who seeks further reformation" (1570s), probably from purity. Largely historical from 19c. in literal sense. After c.1590s, applied to anyone deemed overly strict in matters of religion and morals.\n\nWhat [William] Perkins, and the whole Puritan movement after him, sought was to replace the personal pride of birth and status with the professional's or craftsman's pride of doing one's best in one's particular calling. The good Christian society needs the best of kings, magistrates, and citizens. Perkins most emphasized the work ethic from Genesis: "In the swaete of thy browe shalt thou eate thy breade."
[E. Digby Baltzell, "Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia," 1979]
Wiktionary
a. (often disapproving): acting or behaving according to the Puritan morals (e.g. propagating modesty), especially with regard to pleasure, nudity and sex n. (often disapproving): a puritanical person
WordNet
n. adheres to strict religious principles; opposed to sensual pleasures
a person excessively concerned about propriety and decorum [syn: prude]
adj. morally rigorous and strict; "blue laws"; "the puritan work ethic"; "puritanic distaste for alcohol"; "she was anything but puritanical in her behavior" [syn: blue(a), puritanic, puritanical]
Wikipedia
Puritan was the 1885 America's Cup defender.
The Puritans were a significant grouping of English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Puritan or variants may also refer to:
Usage examples of "puritan".
It must be remarked, that the Puritans were extremely averse to the raising of this ornament to the capital.
The thorough-paced Puritans were distinguishable by the sourness and austerity of their manners, and by their aversion to all pleasure and society.
The last of the old-world Puritans, he departed poring over his well-thumbed Bible, and proclaiming that the troubles of his country arose, not from his own narrow and corrupt administration, but from some departure on the part of his fellow burghers from the stricter tenets of the dopper sect.
That ride, and others like it, had become proverbial among Puritan traders: examplars of Industry.
Puritan Separatists who believed in no overarching structure for the church beyond their own, naturally fissive local gatherings.
But the evening had filled in Furber too, and his fierce puritan intensity.
The strongest overboiling of English Puritan contempt of a gabbler, would not stop women from liking it.
You think me godless and a libertine but it is to me, me, me, not the black crows of Puritans that daily infest this house and shall not infest it more that the task of improving the word of the Lord is given.
No wonder that in an age in which courtiers and theatrehaunters were turning Romanists by the dozen, and the priest-ridden queen was the chief patroness of the theatre, the Puritans should have classed players and Jesuits in the same category, and deduced the parentage of both alike from the father of lies.
After that, I doubt if the court of Charles the Second was regarded by the Puritans with a greater abhorrence than was Mohair by the good ladies of Asquith.
New England school-system, the Puritan code, the ungenial climate, the absence of chivalry.
This earl was a great hypocrite, a pretender to the strictest religion, an encourager of the Puritans, and founder of hospitals.
There were other friends and classmates, one of them a natural humorist of the liveliest sort, who would have been quarantined in any Puritan port, his laugh was so potently contagious.
By the adoption of the new psalmody the Puritan and Presbyterian churches, perhaps not consciously, but none the less actually, yielded the major premiss of the only argument by which liturgical worship was condemned on principle.
The masochistic desire to be exploited that passes as the collective desire of his audience seems almost as perverse as the Puritan desire to be scourged by God.