Straight-laced
adj ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Having narrow views on moral matters; prudish.
"Me thinks St. Augustin was too straight-laced in not liking Organs in Churches."
- 1 exaggeratedly proper wordnet
Example
More examples"He's a really straight-laced guy, so he doesn't like the idea of his son changing jobs."
Etymology
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.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.