Word.ws English Dictionary

pudibund

/ˈpjuːdɪbʌnd/

pudibund adjective: shy, bashful; prudish.

Adjective

pudibund (comparative more pudibund, superlative most pudibund)

  1. (rare) Shy, bashful; prudish.
    • Involuntarily Lucette bent her head and frail spine, then she lay back on the outer half of Ada’s pillow in a martyr’s pudibund swoon, her locks spreading their orange blaze against the black velvet of the padded headboard.1969, Vladimir Nabokov, chapter 8, in Ada, or, Ardor: A Family Chronicle, New York, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill Book Company, →OCLC, page 329

Forms of pudibund

comparativemore pudibund
superlativemost pudibund

Origin of pudibund

From Latin pudibundus, from pudeō (“make ashamed, be ashamed”).

Questions about pudibund

What does pudibund mean?
Pudibund means shy, bashful; prudish.
What part of speech is pudibund?
Pudibund is an adjective.
How do you pronounce pudibund?
Pudibund is pronounced /ˈpjuːdɪbʌnd/.

Words near pudibund in the dictionary

  1. pudginess
  2. pudgy
  3. pudgy wudgies
  4. pudgy wudgy
  5. pudhina
  6. pudibund
  7. pudibundity
  8. pudic
  9. pudical
  10. pudically
  11. pudicitia

Source and license

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