Synonyms of prurient

prurient

adjective

as in warm

formal + usually disapproving having or showing too much interest in sex

He took a prurient interest in their personal life.

a book that appealed to the prurient curiosity of its readers

Related Words

• warm
• unpublishable
• spicy
• obscene
• lascivious
• pornographic
• indecent
• suggestive
• filthy
• smutty
• raunchy
• dirty
• vulgar
• locker-room
• unprintable
• lewd
• bawdy
• ribald
• racy
• porny
• naughty
• gross
• X-rated
• crude
• gutter
• risqué
• gamy
• stag
• nasty
• blue
• salty
• off
• off-color
• leering
• coarse
• indelicate
• earthy
• indecorous
• barnyard
• foul
• immodest
• coarse-grained

Dissimilar Words

• clean
• decent
• innocuous
• inoffensive
• puritanical
• prudish
• Victorian
• G-rated
• priggish
• nonobscene
• staid
• prim
• proper
• correct
• polite
• genteel
• decorous
• respectable
• straitlaced
• seemly
• nice

Example Sentences

Recent Examples of prurient

Space exploration is a symbol of science at its most sophisticated, but the subject has always elicited a few prurient chuckles among civilians about what day-to-day life must really be like for the astronauts. — Michael Tedder, The Atlantic, 12 Apr. 2026

Once printed, less prurient versions of these portraits would be displayed below the marquee at the Teatro Maipo, like religious icons in a vending machine, on the street-level exterior of the venue. — Bryan Barcena, Artforum, 1 Mar. 2026

The result was a niche-celebrity soap opera, generating an explosion of publicity and social-media commentary and mesmerizing a public whose interest, whether prurient or high-minded, appeared inexhaustible. — Molly Fischer, New Yorker, 2 Dec. 2025

The desire to know the answer to those questions is not a matter of prurient nosiness. — Mick Lasalle, San Francisco Chronicle, 13 Feb. 2024