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
  • This is eroticism without prurience.
    — Richard Brody, New Yorker, 13 Jan. 2026
  • Descriptions of her are icky either in their prurience or disgust, with a creepy focus on her body.
    — Alice Bolin, Longreads, 26 June 2018
  • 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
  • Were the photographs made for prurience, to objectify the victims, or to blackmail the guilty?
    — Sam Knight, New Yorker, 16 Feb. 2026
  • Months later people are still asking, and not out of mere prurience, what happened to Steven Murphy?
    — Vicky Ward, Town & Country, 4 Mar. 2015
  • 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
  • Its gutsy prurience often collapses down into muddled emptiness, fun gags that get wasted.
    — K. Austin Collins, Rolling Stone, 23 Dec. 2022
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • Richard Greene, despite his objections to biographical prurience, does give us some piquant details.
    — Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, 15 Mar. 2021
  • Wilde’s writings may be homoerotic, but the prose remains coded and demure; prurience was reserved for the bedroom, and eventually for the courtroom.
    — Colton Valentine, The New Yorker, 13 Feb. 2023
  • 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
  • True crime can be given a gloss of prestige, can approach its subject from new and different angles, and can reach for bigger themes, but there’s a kernel of prurience to the genre that’s never going to go away.
    — Vulture, 28 Oct. 2022
  • 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
  • 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
  • A far cry from Salò, or films dominated by prurience, this movie, and these three lovers, are having a torrid affair with art, politics, and society’s mores—their own little revolution amidst a real one.
    — John Ortved, Vogue, 29 Oct. 2025
  • 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

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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