comstockery
comstockery noun: censorship of literature and performances because of especially broad definitions of obscenity or immorality.
Noun (1)
comstockery (uncountable)
- Censorship of literature and performances because of especially broad definitions of obscenity or immorality.
- Comstockery is the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States.1905, George Bernard Shaw, letter, New York Times, Sept. 26, 1905
- A people unconvinced of the pervasiveness of sin, the supreme importance of moral problems, the need of harsh and inquisitorial laws--in brief, of the whole Puritan theological and political apparatus--would never have permitted the growth of such curious flowers as Comstockery, so obnoxious and so...1916, H. L. Mencken, column, Baltimore Evening Sun, July, 19, 1916
Noun (2) capitalized: Comstockery
Comstockery (uncountable)
- Alternative form of comstockery.
Forms of comstockery
| alternative form | Comstockery |
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Origin of comstockery
Named after Anthony Comstock (1844–1915) (and the Comstock laws which he propagated) + -ery, coined in an editorial in The New York Times in 1895 and famously adopted by George Bernard Shaw in 1905.
Questions about comstockery
- What does comstockery mean?
- Comstockery means censorship of literature and performances because of especially broad definitions of obscenity or immorality.
- What part of speech is comstockery?
- Comstockery is a noun.
Words near comstockery in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: comstockery (page history and authors); Comstockery (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “comstockery.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/comstockery. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.