straight-laced
straight-laced adjective: having narrow views on moral matters; prudish.
Adjective
straight-laced (comparative more straight-laced or straighter-laced, superlative most straight-laced or straightest-laced)
- Having narrow views on moral matters; prudish.
- Me thinks St. Augustin was too straight-laced in not liking Organs in Churches.1687, John Aubrey, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, page 20
- Synonyms:
- tight-laced, stuffy
Synonyms of straight-laced
Forms of straight-laced
| comparative | more straight-laced |
|---|---|
| comparative | straighter-laced |
| superlative | most straight-laced |
| superlative | straightest-laced |
| alternative form | straightlaced |
| alternative form | strait-laced |
| alternative form | straitlaced |
Origin of straight-laced
Widely agreed to have originated (centuries ago) in homophonic confusion (in speech) of strait-laced (“tight-laced”), but long since so widely accepted and used, because having such strongly apparent analogy with straight in its senses relating to orthodoxy and conformity (compare squareness), that it can no longer accurately be called erroneous; instead it is an established alternative form with its own reanalyzed surface analysis. Compare straitjacket with *straightjacket; the latter is still usually regarded as an error, but the relationship is analogous.
Questions about straight-laced
- What does straight-laced mean?
- Straight-laced means having narrow views on moral matters; prudish.
- What part of speech is straight-laced?
- Straight-laced is an adjective.
Words near straight-laced in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: straight-laced (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: “straight-laced.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/straight-laced. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.