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Priapean

Priapean adjective: of, relating to, or in honour of Priapus or Priapos (Ancient Greek: Πρίαπος), a minor rustic fertility god, protector of livestock, fruit plants, gardens, and male genitalia.

Adjective

Priapean (comparative more Priapean, superlative most Priapean)

  1. (Greek) Of, relating to, or in honour of Priapus or Priapos (Ancient Greek: Πρίαπος), a minor rustic fertility god, protector of livestock, fruit plants, gardens, and male genitalia.
    • In sculpture and in the drama, in Aristophanic farce and in hieratic rituals, in pictorial art and in the stream of literature, the phallus is transcendent. Thus the Priapean poetry of the ancients, particularly of the Romans, hymned sexual potency.1961, Harry E. Wedeck, Dictionary of Aphrodisiacs, New York: The Citadel Press, page iii
  2. Of, or relating to, an erect penis; phallic.
    • Ovid, the amatory poet, describes a professional dancing-girl, whose subtle bodily movements are such an excitant as to provoke, in an ascetic such as the ancient Hippolytus, a priapean condition.1961, Harry E. Wedeck, Dictionary of Aphrodisiacs, New York: The Citadel Press, page 85

Noun

Priapean (plural Priapeans)

  1. A kind of hexameter verse so constructed as to be divisible into two portions of three metrical feet each, generally having a trochee in the first and fourth feet and an amphimacer in the third; applied also to a regular hexameter verse when so constructed as to be divisible into two portions of three feet each.

Forms of Priapean

Adjective
comparativemore Priapean
superlativemost Priapean
Noun
pluralPriapeans

Questions about Priapean

What does Priapean mean?
Priapean means of, relating to, or in honour of Priapus or Priapos (Ancient Greek: Πρίαπος), a minor rustic fertility god, protector of livestock, fruit plants, gardens, and male genitalia.
What part of speech is Priapean?
Priapean can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near Priapean in the dictionary

  1. prianiki
  2. prianiks
  3. priant
  4. priants
  5. priany
  6. Priapean
  7. Priapeans
  8. priapi
  9. priapic
  10. priapically
  11. priapism

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Priapean (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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