Meaning of purple prose | Babel Free

Definitions

Extravagant or flowery writing, especially in a literary work.

uncountable

Equivalents

Examples

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

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

“The things, you say / Your purple prose just gives you away / The things, you say / You're unbelievable”

“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.”

CEFR level