Pronunciations (2)
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/ˈpɹɪsi/
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ˈpɹɪsi
Adjective
Prim and fussy; too precise; overparticular.
Usage- Colloquial
- Examples
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She was a small, neat, rather prissy-looking girl with primly smooth brown hair and rimless glasses […]
More examples (1)
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 part of it.
European languages like English are just prissier about getting that pronoun in there.
Lacking masculine vigor; sissified; effeminate.
Usage- Colloquial
- Derogatory
- usually
- Examples
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I refused to wear this properly as it looked a bit prissy, so I butchly slung it over one shoulder.
Mom was always pushing her only daughter to become some kind of prissy feminine beauty.
More examples (6)
A pink can held shaving gel with a prissy, feminine smell.
Her clothes were not at all unusual or fashionable, a plain slate-blue dress and a magenta cardigan sweater with a somewhat prissy line of pearl buttons down the front.
A healthy trepidation about microbes, lice and the like is the key to a happy prissy lifestyle.
“Boots won't fit,” the man said, “and the hat's prissy.
I love pretty shoes that are utterly gorgeous and totally impractical—what I call prissy shoes. […] I would love it if I could wear my prissy shoes for my whole life's journey — no stones on my path, no difficult cracks or crevices; just nice, smooth, straight highways of life.
I had grown up a rather prissy kind of guy. I was never the rough-and-tumble, plastic-gun-toting stereotype of a boy. I preferred neat and orderly and clean and bathed to scattered and strewn and grass-stained and smudged. Clothes pressed, shoes shined. Hair combed, activities quiet.
Well-mannered; well-behaved.
Usage- Colloquial
- Examples
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More examples (1)
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 unpredictable, made up of the extremely sleep deprived, from mothers of newborns to insomniacs in the midst of a divorce.
You drive like one of those prissy ladies at lunch who won't take the last cookie in case somebody else wants it.
More examples (1)
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 prissy, like 'Oh, really It may be only a car to you,' etc., before dissolving, which was what I actually did, into a flurry of impotent fury and tears.
Noun
A person who is prissy.
Usage- Colloquial
- Rare
- Examples
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More examples (1)
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 & enjoys. What a prissy!
Adjective
exaggeratedly proper
- Synonyms
- Examples
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my straitlaced Aunt Anna doesn't approve of my miniskirts
excessively fastidious and easily disgusted
- Examples
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too nice about his food to take to camp cooking
so squeamish he would only touch the toilet handle with his elbow