puritanical
/pjʊərɪˈtanɪk(ə)l
/adjective
Having or displaying a very strict or censorious moral attitude towards self-indulgence or sex: his puritanical parents saw any kind of pleasure as the road to damnation...
- Africans have quite our prim, puritanical attitude towards extra - marital sex.
- It's about time we abandoned this puritanical attitude toward sex.
- Compare that to the United States with our puritanical attitudes toward sex and federal funding for abstinence-only education.
Synonyms
moralistic, pietistic, strait-laced, tight-laced, stuffy, starchy, prissy, prudish, puritan, prim, priggish, Victorian, schoolmarmish, schoolmistressy, old-maidish, narrow-minded, censorious, sententious;
austere, severe, spartan, ascetic, hair-shirt, abstemious
informal goody-goody
rare Grundyish
Derivatives
puritanically
- No party hack, she campaigns for a purer communism responsive to the needs of each neighborhood but puritanically resistant to the commercial blandishments even then battering at the eastern gates.
- At a time when everyone else was tripping out on psychedelic rock Flack's recording of Ewan Macoll's folk song was an unlikely hit; the music was puritanically plain, the words so simple.
- Benglis's photograph can be read in various ways, appealing to the libertarian feminist as surely as it repelled the more puritanically minded.