Word.ws English Dictionary

purple prose

purple prose noun: extravagant or flowery writing, especially in a literary work.

Noun

purple prose (uncountable)

  1. Extravagant or flowery writing, especially in a literary work.
    • Swinburne is often a very discerning critic in spite of his penchant for purple prose.1932, Harry T. Baker, “Hazlitt as a Shakespearean Critic”, in PMLA, volume 47, number 1, page 198
    • His persecuted characters bleed purple prose, and he persistently confuses an assault on the nerves with a cry from the heart.1960 October 24, “Book of Lamentations”, in Time, archived from the original on 13 Apr 2008, (review of The Last of the Just by André Schwarz-Bart)

Examples of purple prose in a sentence

  • The things, you say / Your purple prose just gives you away / The things, you say / You're unbelievable1991, “Unbelievable”, in Schubert Dip, performed by EMF:
  • An antibiological bias […] was stimulated by a flood of popular and scholarly books in the 1960s and 1970s (some awash in deep purple prose) saying that male domination was natural and inevitable.2004, Joan Huber, “Lenski Effects on Sex Stratification Theory”, in Sociological Theory, volume 22, number 2, page 261:

Origin of purple prose

Derived from a reference by the Roman poet Horace.

Questions about purple prose

What does purple prose mean?
Purple prose means extravagant or flowery writing, especially in a literary work.
How do you use purple prose in a sentence?
The things, you say / Your purple prose just gives you away / The things, you say / You're unbelievable
What part of speech is purple prose?
Purple prose is a noun.

Words near purple prose in the dictionary

  1. purple pitcher plant
  2. purple pitcher plants
  3. purple plague
  4. purple prairie clover
  5. purple prairie clovers
  6. purple prose
  7. purple quartz
  8. purple rice
  9. purple rices
  10. purple sandpiper
  11. purple sandpipers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: purple prose (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-purple prose.ogg.

Cite this entry: “purple prose.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/purple_prose. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.