Word.ws English Dictionary

plaster saint

plaster saint noun: someone who makes a show of being benevolent and morally upright, often in a hypocritical way.

Noun

plaster saint (plural plaster saints)

  1. Someone who makes a show of being benevolent and morally upright, often in a hypocritical way.
  2. A model of correct behavior.
    • We aren’t no thin red ’eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too,
      But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
      An’ if sometimes our conduck isn’t all your fancy paints,
      Why, single men in barricks don’t grow into plaster saints;1892, Rudyard Kipling, Tommy
    • Of course, I don’t want to make [prison] officers into plaster saints; and they themselves would not want such an absurd depiction.2017, Theodore Dalrymple, The Knife Went In

Forms of plaster saint

pluralplaster saints

Questions about plaster saint

What does plaster saint mean?
Plaster saint means someone who makes a show of being benevolent and morally upright, often in a hypocritical way.
What part of speech is plaster saint?
Plaster saint is a noun.
What is the plural of plaster saint?
The plural of plaster saint is plaster saints.

Words near plaster saint in the dictionary

  1. plaster casts
  2. plaster of Paris
  3. plaster ring
  4. plaster room
  5. plaster rooms
  6. plaster saint
  7. plaster saints
  8. plaster-of-Paris
  9. plaster-stone
  10. plasterable
  11. plasterboard

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: plaster saint (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “plaster saint.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/plaster_saint. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.