prurience

Other forms: pruriences

Prurience is when someone pays too much attention to sex. The prurience of a particular movie might have made it off limits when you were young.

The prurience of a book or movie is based on the fact that it's excessively focused on sex. You might criticize your friend's gossipy stories for their prurience, and the prurience of a particular web site, magazine, or book is likely to get it banned in a high school. Prurience comes from prurient, which started out meaning "itching," and evolved to mean "having an itching desire," or "lewd." The Latin root is prurire, which means both "to itch" and "to long for."

Definitions of prurience

1. noun

   feeling morbid sexual desire or a propensity to lewdness
   synonyms: carnality, lasciviousness, lubricity, pruriency

   type of:

   amativeness, amorousness, eroticism, erotism, sexiness

   the arousal of feelings of sexual desire