prissy
Prim and fussy; too precise; overparticular.
Adjective
- Prim and fussy; too precise; overparticular.
- She was a small, neat, rather prissy-looking girl with primly smooth brown hair and rimless glasses […] - 1949, Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister:
- As Nathanial Mayweather, heir to the Mayweather Hotel fortune, Elliott doesn’t disdain the hoi polloi so much as he considers everyone, even the faculty and headmaster at the prissiest private school in existence, to be...
- European languages like English are just prissier about getting that pronoun in there. - 2014, John H. McWhorter, The Language Hoax:
- Lacking masculine vigor; sissified; effeminate.
- I refused to wear this properly as it looked a bit prissy, so I butchly slung it over one shoulder. - 1983, Bill Oddie, Gone Birding, London: Methuen, page 51:
- Mom was always pushing her only daughter to become some kind of prissy feminine beauty. - 1994, H W Wilson, Joni Richards Bodart, Booktalking the Award Winners - Volume 3, page 31:
- A pink can held shaving gel with a prissy, feminine smell. - 2002, Eileen Wilks, The Loner and the Lady, page 179:
- Well-mannered; well-behaved.
- As women post en masse over the course of the day and long into the night, the mood changes: The daylight crowd tends to be prissier; the night crowd rowdier (and drunker); the late-night crowd surrealistic and...
- You drive like one of those prissy ladies at lunch who won't take the last cookie in case somebody else wants it. - 2010, J. D. Robb, Visions In Death, page 19:
- I may – I forget now – have suffixed it slightly; with a well-rounded 'Stuff you!' or 'But my car, you bastard!'. But then again, surely not. This was my boss, after all. More likely I would have said something more...
Origin
1895, either an alteration of precise, blend of prim + sissy, or a blend of prim + fussy; first attested in a work of American writer Joel Chandler Harris.
Forms
Derived
Noun
- A person who is prissy.
- 1970-1975, Lou Sullivan, personal diary, quoted in 2019, Ellis Martin, Zach Ozma (editors), We Both Laughed In Pleasure I really like Beau. He sure enjoys being admired & lusted over. He just lays back like a king &...