- 1
If a look, a question, a film, or a newspaper is prurient, it shows too much interest in sex, in a way the speaker finds cheap or ugly. The word judges. A prurient interest in a neighbour’s marriage is not healthy curiosity; it is nosy desire dressed up as interest. Critics talk about prurient details, a prurient camera, prurient headlines on the front of a paper. It is formal, a little literary. You will not hear a teenager say it at lunch. They would say “gross,” “dirty,” or “why are they so interested in that?” Though actually, the Latin behind it means . An you keep scratching — that is the picture. English kept the for sex, and only for the too-much kind. It is not a fancy word for sexy, and it is not a compliment to anyone’s body. Sexy can be kind or fun. Prurient never is. It also faces the other way from : is too shocked; prurient is too interested. Both complain.
好色的、帶著淫念的（貶義）
組成Learned borrowing from Latin prūriēns, the present participle of prūriō (“itch”).
同家族的字
- pruriencethe noun from this adjective
- prurientlythis adjective plus -ly
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
prurientadj/ˈpɹʊəɹ.i.ənt/
- 1
Uneasy with desire; itching; especially, having a lascivious anxiety or propensity; lustful.
- We know that at that period certain indecencies in the dresses, even of those who were considered as the most refined and polished men of the age, were not only tolerated but ostentatiously displayed, and every sort of device that the most prurient mind could think of was had recourse to, to attract attention or excite a smile.
- For example, some of the more prudish senders may have averted their attention from the sexual pictures while other more prurient viewers may have intensified their gaze.
- 2
Arousing or appealing to sexual desire.
- […]nor is it more prurient or lascivious than many productions to be found in a circulating library.
- But in contemporary consumerist societies, when the kids are safely in bed, television programs allow viewers to indulge their more prurient interests.
- 3
Curious, especially inappropriately so.
- Had she known that prurient anecdotes, breaches of confidence, scandalous facts, and cruel observations, were intended to constitute the matter and to enhance the price, her very heart would have broken under the affliction such a disgraceful proceeding exhibited,...
- Much of my discussion in the previous two chapters has focused on the dichotomy in Alemán's novel between the author's stated interest in moral didacticism and the more prurient appeal of the novel's representations of material privation and violent spectacle.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。