Word.ws English Dictionary

pearl clutching

pearl clutching noun: ostentatious prim or prudish behaviour, as when being offended.

Noun

pearl clutching (uncountable)

  1. (derogatory, idiomatic) Ostentatious prim or prudish behaviour, as when being offended.
    • Vance, in response to the Politico report on Tuesday, said he refuses “to join the pearl clutching when people call for political violence.”2025 October 15, Ryan Mancini, “Carville rips Vance for response to Young Republican group chat”, in The Hill, archived from the original on 17 Oct 2025

Forms of pearl clutching

alternative formpearl-clutching

Origin of pearl clutching

From the image of a genteel woman clutching her pearl necklace in shock.

Questions about pearl clutching

What does pearl clutching mean?
Pearl clutching means ostentatious prim or prudish behaviour, as when being offended.
What part of speech is pearl clutching?
Pearl clutching is a noun.

Words near pearl clutching in the dictionary

  1. pearl bodies
  2. pearl body
  3. pearl bush
  4. pearl bushes
  5. Pearl City
  6. pearl clutching
  7. pearl cooler
  8. pearl coolers
  9. pearl couscous
  10. pearl danio
  11. pearl danios

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pearl clutching (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: “pearl clutching.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pearl_clutching. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.