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Excessive or affected modesty
Answer for the clue "Excessive or affected modesty ", 7 letters:
prudery
Word definitions for prudery in dictionaries
WordNet
Word definitions in WordNet
n. excessive or affected modesty [syn: primness , prudishness , Grundyism ]
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Word definitions in The Collaborative International Dictionary
Prudery \Prud"er*y\, n.; pl. Pruderies . [F. pruderie. See Prude .] The quality or state of being prudish; excessive or affected scrupulousness in speech or conduct; stiffness; coyness. --Cowper.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Word definitions in Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1709, from prude + -ery and in part from French pruderie .\nThe peculiarity of prudery is to multiply sentinels, in proportion as the fortress is less threatened. [Victor Hugo, "Les Misérables"]\nSome 20c. writers in English used extended form prudibundery ...
Wiktionary
Word definitions in Wiktionary
n. 1 (context uncountable English) The condition of being prudish; prudishness 2 (context countable English) Prudish behaviour
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Word definitions in Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
noun EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS ▪ A single incident suggests a great deal about Hennepinhis prudery , his belligerence, his sensitivity. ▪ For those raised in the prudery of puritanism or the celibacy-conscious preoccupations of Catholicism this ran against the ...
Usage examples of prudery.
But her conscience, or her prudery, not permitting her to tolerate longer a manner of life in which she seemed to detect license, she quitted Ninon, advising her to renounce coquetry, whilst the other was advising her to abandon herself to it.
Someone once said that to know her was to understand what Elizabethan girls were like, virgins without prurience or prudery.
The chief obstacle in the way of this ideal is Anglo-Saxon prudery, and, perhaps, the reader will not be persuaded that education for parenthood is our greatest educational need to-day, more especially for girls, until he or she has been persuaded of the magnitude of the preventable evils which flow from our present neglect of this matter.
I blamed myself for my scrupulous behaviour, which seemed no better than prudery.
Though I was for a moment vexed at her prudery, or whatever you may choose to call it, if I had made so uncavalier, not to say brutal, a speech, I am convinced Lady Byron would instantly have left the carriage to me and the maid.
Her naive stories, her freedom from prudery, and her sallies full of wit and good sense, amused me from morning till night, and we sometimes thoued each other.
Baggie-dresses and prudery were crippling limitations rather than assurers of innocence.
There came a hideous return to the worst prudery of Victorianism as society fought the sexual and moral dangers of jaunting with protocol and taboo.
It reeked of pruderies and fears, anxieties hidden from the world but carried everywhere, like a Freudian fanny-pack.
When their intellectual outlook is narrow, they fall into all sorts of holy excesses, fanaticism or theopathic absorption, self-torment, prudery, scrupulosity, gullibility, and morbid inability to meet the world.