sanctimonious
adjective
G. B. Shaw
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How Shakespeare Used Sanctimonious
There’s nothing sacred about sanctimonious—at least not anymore. But in the early 1600s, the English adjective was still sometimes used to describe someone truly holy or pious, a sense at an important remove from today’s use describing someone who acts or behaves as though they are morally superior to others. (The now-obsolete “pious” sense recalls the meaning of the word’s Latin parent, sanctimonia, meaning “holiness” or “sanctity.”) Shakespeare used both the “holy” and “holier-than-thou” senses of sanctimonious in his work, referring in The Tempest to the “sanctimonious” (that is, “holy”) ceremonies of marriage, and in Measure for Measure to “the sanctimonious pirate that went to sea with the Ten Commandments but scraped one out of the table.” (Apparently, the pirate found the restriction on stealing inconvenient.)
Examples of sanctimonious in a Sentence
Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter, 28 Nov. 2024
The Byzantines wrote an amoral flexibility into their system, despite its putative religiosity—a realistic approach that has become more difficult to accomplish in the United States, partly owing to the power of a sanctimonious media establishment.
—Robert D. Kaplan, Foreign Affairs, 4 Oct. 2022
This is the sanctimonious language of social media — the tone and medium Adichie criticized in her 2021 blog post — not of a nuanced social novel.
—Sanjena Sathian, Vulture, 24 Feb. 2025
My point is simply that these perspectives have been so abused in America that God has become a sanctimonious prop that has more to do with a person’s politics than with any authentic spiritual insight.
—B.g. White, Hartford Courant, 18 Feb. 2025
See All Example Sentences for sanctimonious
Cite this Entry
“Sanctimonious.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sanctimonious. Accessed 25 Mar. 2025.
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