Word.ws English Dictionary

Uriah Heepishness

Uriah Heepishness noun: fawning, cloying servility and obsequiousness.

Noun

Uriah Heepishness (uncountable)

  1. Fawning, cloying servility and obsequiousness.
    • To a man, the other candidates, imagining the College expected them to glorify Uriah Heepishness, proceeded on the old trite track to decry ambition as one of the devastating forces of humanity.1887, Compton Reade, editor, Charles Reade, Dramatist, Novelist, Journalist: A Memoir Compiled Chiefly from His Literary Remains, volume 1, Chapman and Hall, page 122
    • One must agree that the formulas they commend to Democratic politicians as a means of distancing themselves from student unrest and so on are crude; and the Uriah Heepishness of Hubert Humphrey's American Bar Association speech (apparently written by Wattenberg) was hardly attractive.1970 December 7, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “The City Politic: Scammon and Wattenberg vs. Lubell”, in New York Magazine, page 9

Origin of Uriah Heepishness

From Uriah Heepish + -ness: From the Dickens character Uriah Heep, noted for his cloying humility, obsequiousness, and insincerity, the stereotypical yes man.

Questions about Uriah Heepishness

What does Uriah Heepishness mean?
Uriah Heepishness means fawning, cloying servility and obsequiousness.
What part of speech is Uriah Heepishness?
Uriah Heepishness is a noun.

Words near Uriah Heepishness in the dictionary

  1. Uriah Heep
  2. Uriah Heeped
  3. Uriah Heeping
  4. Uriah Heepish
  5. Uriah Heepishly
  6. Uriah Heepishness
  7. Uriah Heeps
  8. urial
  9. urials
  10. uriam
  11. Urian

Source and license

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