Word.ws English Dictionary

purity ball

purity ball noun: a formal dance event attended by fathers and their teenage daughters to promote virginity until marriage; mostly among conservative Christian groups in the United States.

Noun

purity ball (plural purity balls)

  1. (US) A formal dance event attended by fathers and their teenage daughters to promote virginity until marriage; mostly among conservative Christian groups in the United States.
    • Despite all the coverage of the Wilson family and their balls’ dramatic imagery — the girls doing ballet, placing roses before a cross, ballroom-dancing with their dads — there is little hard evidence that purity balls have spread much beyond Colorado Springs.2012 July 21, Mark Oppenheimer, “‘Purity Balls’ Get Attention, but Might Not Be All They Claim”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 12 Nov 2020
    • Arguably, the focus on "purity" in evangelical culture arose in response to a secular, sex-obsessed American culture; for example, the first purity ball was hosted in 1998 by a Christian family in Colorado Springs as a celebration of father-daughter relationships and girls' virginity.2015 March 4, Emma Green, “Yes, It's Possible to Be a Christian and a Feminist”, in The Atlantic, archived from the original on 03 Aug 2020

Forms of purity ball

pluralpurity balls

Questions about purity ball

What does purity ball mean?
Purity ball means a formal dance event attended by fathers and their teenage daughters to promote virginity until marriage; mostly among conservative Christian groups in the United States.
What part of speech is purity ball?
Purity ball is a noun.
What is the plural of purity ball?
The plural of purity ball is purity balls.

Words near purity ball in the dictionary

  1. puriteens
  2. purities
  3. puritogen
  4. Puriton
  5. purity
  6. purity ball
  7. purity balls
  8. purity pledge
  9. purity pledges
  10. purity ring
  11. purity rings

Source and license

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