purple prose

English

WOTD – 13 October 2012

Etymology

Derived from a reference by the Roman poet Horace.

Pronunciation

• Audio (AU):

  (file)

Noun

Examples
“It was a dark and stormy night, the rain fell in torrents– […] ”

purple prose (uncountable)

1. (idiomatic) Extravagant or flowery writing, especially in a literary work.
   • 1932, Harry T. Baker, "Hazlitt as a Shakespearean Critic," PMLA, vol. 47, no. 1, p. 198:

     Swinburne is often a very discerning critic in spite of his penchant for purple prose.

   • 1960 Oct. 24, "Book of Lamentations" (Review of The Last of the Just by André Schwarz-Bart), Time:

     His persecuted characters bleed purple prose, and he persistently confuses an assault on the nerves with a cry from the heart.

   • 2004, Joan Huber, "Lenski Effects on Sex Stratification Theory," Sociological Theory, vol. 22, no. 2, p. 261:

     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.

Translations

extravagant or flowery writing

• Chinese:

  Mandarin: please add this translation if you can

• Dutch: bloemrijke taal f
• (deprecated template usage) {{trans-mid}}
• Finnish: kukkaiskieli
• French: langage fleuri (fr) m
• Portuguese: verborragismo m

Further reading

• purple prose on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• “purple prose”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.