pruriencen.

a1688 R. Cudworth Treat. Eternal & Immutable Morality (1731) iii. i. 83 Pruriences and Titillations of the Body.

1769 R. W. Johnson New Syst. Midwifery vii. 131 She feels a prurience within the vagina and labia pudendi; which soon changes to a smarting, pricking, and burning pain.

1782 J. Aitken Elements Theory & Pract. Physic & Surg. II. 17 Imposthume is detacted by inflammation becoming softish about its centre, by exhibiting fluctuation, and commonly by a remission of the inflammatory pain and the substitution of an itching one, or prurience.

1762 Vindic. Rights Authors to their own Wks. 40 Many futile and obscene productions will be adapted to the prurience and depravity of the great and small vulgar.

1797 N. Lee's Mithridates (rev. ed.) Critique Ovid, the prurience of whose imagination probably recommended his writings to most readers, in the luxurious and debauched reigns of Charles and James the Second.

1849 Fraser's Mag. 39 109 Young men in London, with their prurience, their effeminacy, their quill-driving commercialism.

1871 A. C. Swinburne in Fortn. Rev. July 289 The wriggling prurience of such lackey's literature as is handed round.

1891 W. Morris News from Nowhere ix. 68 Brought up in affected ignorance of natural facts, reared in an atmosphere of mingled prudery and prurience.

1956 N. Algren Walk on Wild Side ii. 136 Fort had that pinewood prurience that made him feel that going half-naked into the sea, even in the summer night's sheltering dark, was ‘lewdling’.

1992 Vis à Vis July 58/2 Tenneson captures the human figure, frequently nude, with a loving complexity that transcends prurience.

1777 R. Potter in tr. Æschylus Tragedies 584 (note) Mr. Heath, who always hath a prurience to quarrel with Pauw quo jure, quâve injuriâ.

1796 C. Burney tr. P. Metastasio Let. in Mem. Life Metastasio I. xi. 387 I thank you for your partial analysis of my Regulus; you gratify my pious prurience by it, as this opera is the Benjamin of all the rest.

1829 I. Taylor Nat. Hist. Enthusiasm ix. 231 An irresistible prurience asking for the marvellous.

1879 F. Harrison Choice Bks. (1886) 29 This literary prurience after new print unmans us.

1881 Atlantic Monthly Aug. 209/2 Every day brings occasion to gratify the prurience of your neighbor's vanity by the tickling of direct flattery, or to soothe it with the soft caress of seeming sympathy.

1910 Times 2 Sept. 7/5 The noblest of human faculties is perverted into a kind of intellectual prurience more replusive than the indifference of animals.

1980 J. Wainwright Dominoes i. 15 Because the prurience in his loins was something he couldn't control, his outrage against the woman mounted.

2006 Herald (Glasgow) (Nexis) 15 June 2 A grisly, pointless wallow in other people's pain, which panders to the lowest kind of prurience while adding nothing to the debate.