How to Use prurience in a Sentence

prurience

noun
  • But there is more than prurience in their gaze, and in the movie’s.
    Justin Chang, chicagotribune.com, 5 Dec. 2019
  • Descriptions of her are icky either in their prurience or disgust, with a creepy focus on her body.
    Alice Bolin, Longreads, 26 June 2018
  • Months later people are still asking, and not out of mere prurience, what happened to Steven Murphy?
    Vicky Ward, Town & Country, 4 Mar. 2015
  • But perhaps to avoid any charges of prurience, Richard Greene lets a stream of prostitutes and lovers flow through the book as one-dimensional as shapes in a shooting gallery.
    Washington Post, 15 Jan. 2021
  • The sins against her are so numerous, and presented so salaciously, that their prurience becomes the motor that drives the film.
    Stephanie Zacharek, Time, 22 Sep. 2022
  • Easier to transpose it into a key of prurience and wait for the whole thing to stroke itself into exhaustion.
    Laurie Penny, Longreads, 18 Jan. 2018
  • A year and a half ago, however, for the 2016 edition, photographed by Annie Leibovitz, the calendar’s raison d’être took a sharp turn from prurience to pride.
    Elizabeth Paton, New York Times, 20 July 2017
  • But the director, who wrote the script with Chris Bergoch, avoids the traps of condescension and prurience that ensnare too many well-meaning movies about poverty in America.
    A. O. Scott, New York Times, 5 Oct. 2017
  • The burden of the film is that Marilyn was, from first to last, a victim, inundated with prurience, misogyny, and venom.
    Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 16 Sep. 2022
  • Stories about those who arrive on a therapist’s couch to complain about their love woes may appeal to our instincts for voyeurism, but Mr. Tallis never veers into prurience.
    Emily Bobrow, WSJ, 5 Oct. 2018
  • These days, fans spread rumors and memes, which are picked up by media outlets, which disguise their prurience with speculation about box-office prospects or reviews.
    Carina Chocano, New York Times, 23 Sep. 2022
  • Grevenitis hopes that the photography, which has allowed her control over the prurience of outsiders, will perhaps provide her daughter with something similar.
    Eren Orbey, The New Yorker, 18 Aug. 2020
  • Trump’s journey to the White House would have been inconceivable without the coarseness of the Clinton years, a coarseness equally attributable to popular culture and the newfound web, the president’s scandals and the prurience of his critics.
    David Friend, Newsweek, 7 Sep. 2017
  • Her name is Nazuna (Suzu Hirose), and the movie continually scrutinizes her body with the sort of prurience that feeds the skeeziest, most stereotypical assumptions about the filmmakers’ chosen medium.
    Justin Chang, latimes.com, 2 July 2018
  • Richard Greene, despite his objections to biographical prurience, does give us some piquant details.
    Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, 15 Mar. 2021
  • Gawkers jostle for a viewing, journalists angle for takes; in the crowd, expressions of reverent fascination vie with cynical dismissals and racist prurience.
    The New York Review of Books, 21 Feb. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'prurience.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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